A Spring Day's Gaze

VERONIKA KLANCNIK 1974 - 2005

May has been very busy and I am down to posting once a month, a rather lamer version of the blogger that I am. I have been doing some wonderful things and enjoying the full energy of spring which gets me up at 6 whether or not the alarm is set. I love working at a university in a park. I loved coming to work one morning and seeing the new green leaves on the horse chestnut trees which had popped out like magic overnight. Then they were blooming, and I loved the sweet smell of the flowers as I passed under them on my bike. Today it is warm but there is a little breeze, and the smell of the lake has begun to grow stronger. I saw the bright red wink of a brown bird's tail in the park this morning.

Spring and summer role around and I think of my friend Veronika who died too young as her birthday and the anniversary of her death approach. In the Middle Ages, churches celebrated death as the real birth day. We don't think so today, and who knows what kind of world we move to when we die, but I like to remember her around this time, as the sun moves into Cancer and everything feels soft and smells sweet. The sky is pink in the evenings and light when I awake. 

I first met her in the park with the chestnut trees and she softened my arrival in Geneva and became my first friend here. I wish I could have known her longer. Once we waded in a kiddie pool in a dark park, high on champagne or each other or strawberries or the weather or whatever; I like how this season brings these memories back to me. I've written other poems for her, not sure this is the second, but there you have it.

Veronika 2

How nice to find your gaze
in somebody else's eyes
or is it something around
the mouth or is it a shared
intellect? I don't know but
what's missed usually reappears,
a tender boy I once knew
whose body I see in a man
I crossed paths with in the cafeteria.

You were there too, maybe
in her way of stepping
or in her round face or in
the space between her eyes,
but yours were blue.

That came out today and all I had to do was arrange the lines a little. Difficult things are easier in Spring.

April My Darling it's Spring

I think this poem speaks for itself, speaks for me.

when faces called flowers float out of the ground
when faces called flowers float out of the ground
and breathing is wishing and wishing is having-
but keeping is downward and doubting and never
-it's april (yes,april;my darling)it's spring!
yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly
yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be
yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be
(yes the mountains are dancing together)
when every leaf opens without any sound
and wishing is having and having is giving-
but keeping is doting and nothing and nonsense
-alive;we're alive,dear:it's(kiss me now)spring!
now the pretty birds hover so she and so he
now the little fish quiver so you and so i
(now the mountains are dancing, the mountains)
when more than was lost has been found has been found
and having is giving and giving is living-
but keeping is darkness and winter and cringing
-it's spring(all our night becomes day)o,it's spring!
all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the sky
all the little fish climb through the mind of the sea
(all the mountains are dancing;are dancing)

Dancing mountains, little fish swimming and climbing, flowers like faces, birds diving, giving and having and living, but not keeping. And the word "gambol". I am feeling thankful for poetry, and for e. e. cummings.

On Friday night I went to hear Carol Ann Duffy, the British poet Laureate. It really was spring, and the room was warm, and the lighting was bad, but she read and I was moved. It was poetry being poetry. She read poems about wives and school girls and I was glad to be there with my friends. I bought a book of poems for children. She signed it and I gave her my green pen.
 

Empathy for vegetables

I realized I'm an empathetic vegetable buyer. What this means is that, in the grocery store, if I haven't been able to go to the market, I buy vegetables that are slightly past it in order to save them from being put in the trash. I feel bad for the vegetables that have begun to turn brown in their plastic and turn down other, fresher specimens, in order to rescue the tired vegetables, the unwanted ones. 

I am not sure what this says about me. It maybe says something about how I react and interact with our current consumeristic society, but it makes no sense since I have little money and should really be investing in my health and well being by buying fresh vegetables. Maybe it says something about how I feel in grocery stores, slightly overwhelmed and confused, even with a list. Or it may just speak to my love of vegetables. One can also better understand why I don't often buy meat.

In February I was still sick, but happier. Now it is March, almost spring, and I have energy again. The sun came out. The hole turned itself around, I started noticing trees. I got more work. I'm feeling productive. My dissertation still waits for me to pour over it compassionately, but somehow, I'm more interested in saving past-it vegetables.

A friend gave me plants which I have placed in my office, bright greens on a pale green formica desktop. I want to post a poem that involves the color green. I had a birthday during a warm week of springlike weather, though it's still early, pre-spring.

My grandmother painted mountains

I said to you in the morning
this day is beautiful,
the grey air, the mildness, a pre-spring you said,
we couldn't see the mountains.

The green moss on buildings,
or how things beautify themselves with age.

That is a nostalgic poem, but I'm feeling less nostalgic, these days. The past seems less of a burden, and more something... to feel empathetic about? Even vegetables die, I can't save them all. 

Once a vegetable market made me cry.

When the vegetable market made me cry

All the beauty of the world dispersed 
like fruits and vegetables at market.

Gatherings of color and wood,
paper, a way under the trees.

A smile from an unshaved man
through the bus window,

but no barriers, no distance
and understood all the beauty of the world. 

Well, I tried to put that into words.

Moving Forward

January felt like a black hole; a sinkhole. I observe, I don't fall in. Here we were not writing, we were trying to get out of bed. We were trying to move forward.

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

In this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, there is a feeling of falling upward which I admire. Reading down the lines, the poet falls from the sky, yet the reader moves upward, the image of standing on fish. This past month, though I felt like I was falling downwards, I also had experiences which brought me upwards, or made me feel larger in knowledge of myself, moments when I saw myself more clearly, when I grasped something I hadn't seen before. There were angels in this movement, so I wasn't alone. Moving down, I often felt lifted up. Winter stretched from white sky to white sky and I could have been above or below. The deeper parts of my life are opening, but sometimes the going is slow and painful. This poem reminds us of reversibility, when down is up, and up is down, and how there is an equilibrium to reach where there is clarity and harmony, a peaceful mind despite a constant cough and dripping nose. 

I lost my voice, but know it is a chance to feel how I speak and sing in a new way. I feel my throat.

Louise Hay links throat problems to fear of change in her book Heal the Body. I suppose I am scared of change, like most of us. I don't like it. They changed the tram lines and I wanted to complain along with the entire city. They added a preposition to my favorite bus stop and I wanted to protest the first time I heard it. I found it irritating. Then there are the larger changes I fear in my life. Letting go of the past, of loved ones. I have anxiety about what will come next which makes me unable to be in the moment and appreciate what I have. I lose productivity. I look inwards only. Looking back, looking forward, I miss what is in front of me now, which is often sweet, bittersweet in February, and makes me cry. A weepy month for saying goodbye, though I'm not even sure to what. To myself I suppose. An old version of myself I already miss. But holding on to it makes me sick, so I purge and clean, go over the reasons again, watch it drop away, far below. In the spring I'll be new again.

The Only Ever Constant Change

We choose what we will call it,
Chemicals or Sense,
Dumb Individuality,
Science or Intent,
Will or Intuition,
Helplessness or Force,
The strength is in the giving,
The subsequence of naming,
Despite the Truth of course.

A special thanks to Helen for the Rilke poem and to all my fellow fish.

A Certain Kind of Eden

Mid-december. I had started  a post about teaching children, which I do a lot. Maybe I will keep doing that when I am done. Progress has been slow, and the winter has come accompanied with its usual difficulties: I want to go really slow. This has not been helped by the fact that I haven't had a vacation in a while, and I need one. I am taking one, and I hope to come back to writing with renewed vigor, though for now, I can't stand it. Why did I decide to write a dissertation? I feel like it was a purely masochistic idea, fueled by a need to prove myself to someone, but I don't remember who. All I want to do is knit. I need a vacation, did I already say that?

I am enjoying reading a Hardy Boys mystery with one ten year old. He really likes it, though he doesn't understand everything and I have to explain to him the finer references to American history. The Hardy Boys were from New England, and that is where I am going in a few days. Maybe there will be some mystery to solve, involving my manuscript perhaps, an old library in New York, a stolen book. I think I would like to write children's fiction. It would be difficult to come up with all those details that keep the little reader reading, and I think I would want to get rid of stock figures like the fat friend who is trying to lose weight, the single and overly maternal aunt, the "drifter" (I had to explain that that was an old fashioned term for a homeless person). I like explaining the nineteen sixties vocabulary to my student. Today he asked me, "did they have electric boats then?" I answered him, "yes, I think so". I'd have to get better at writing dialogue. I am not even sure how to punctuate it. In the Hardy Boys series, I like the use of italics. Mostly it announces danger.

I shared the following poem with my poetry group with relative success. It's an odd poem, an old poem, but it describes pretty well how I feel during these darker days. My friends and readers were helpful about what to get rid of, how to rename it, what worked and what didn't. Mostly it did work, so I'm sharing it here too:

Wading the depth that was our eye to eye

I went to the market but there wasn't a market
I walked by the ocean but there wasn't a shore
I watched the sun rise but there wasn't a mountain
I saw the sun set from behind a closed door.

If walking and searching and seeing are chances
To find and not find, to lose and combine,
I'd rather be wading this edgeness of nothing
Then sitting at home dreaming twine and untwine.

And if tomorrow you can find me laughing
Don't take and don't mend, just circle the time
With your finger and gently do place me upon it
And turn me and twist me and find my right rhyme.

I went to the market but there wasn't a market
I woke up to darkness on a sandless shore
I climbed to the top but forgot that the mountain
Was downward bent feeling my heart's hidden core.

One reader said it was a ballad, a ballad to sing perhaps, though I am not sure what it's about. I feels like it comes from somewhere deep, somewhere I don't really know about, the place, perhaps where the poetry comes from, elsewhere. One of my readers, author of a captivating book, Little Venus, which I highly recommend, mentioned that I might like the poet Kay Ryan, recent poet laureate, because of her use of rhyme. And I do. I leave her with you, in this season, when, perhaps, we would all like to go back. 

A Certain Kind of Eden

It seems like you could, but
you can’t go back and pull
the roots and runners and replant.
It’s all too deep for that.
You’ve overprized intention,
have mistaken any bent you’re given
for control. You thought you chose
the bean and chose the soil.
You even thought you abandoned
one or two gardens. But those things
keep growing where we put them—
if we put them at all.
A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope.

Maybe that is what I need, a certain kind of green, a certain kind of hope.

Calico Cat

So, I handed in pages, and the reply was encouraging, but I have to reorganize my entire première partie. This totally makes sense. I don't feel bad about it. I had written it according to the flow of my discoveries, not according to the argument which is my thesis. My advisor asked me: Qu'est-ce votre thèse? This question, what is my dissertation, struck me as eminently philosophical and I took a moment to consider it, then realized it was a rhetorical question, to get me back on track. What is my thesis? Well, I have a better idea now. I need to rewrite my outline, defining the argument for each point, in order to be clear about where I am headed, in order to let my reader in on the meaning that is unfolding. But I don't feel discouraged. I think all my bits of text are usable, and she was helpful; I have to finish, "it's promising!" she told me.

So I'm writing here instead of rewriting my outline. My promise has not yet been fixed upon the page. The possibility of my dissertation, what the book could be, lulls me and I seem to prefer this liminal state to that of actually finishing. Somehow I'm scared of finishing. I know I will, I know it will get done, though I don't know how, but I'd rather not imagine it too concretely and sometimes I'd just rather not move in that direction at all. Finishing? What will I do afterwards since I've been doing this for so long?

I do also look forward to moving on and doing something else with my time. I want to be done. I want to teach, to write of other things, I want to be more of an adult and less of a student at 33. I want less time alone and more exchange. I want to move out of this office which is no longer really mine. I want to move out of my little apartment and live with my lover. I want, I want to know what I want. I even put it on my to do list for the month of November: Figure out what I want! Right under "finish first part of my dissertation". One step forward at a time.

Ink

We need to remember what ink is made of.
How they sold us time, all wrapped up,
to make us miserable.
How we wrote and wrote,
how I write to stop.
How the word on paper killed the voice,
how the voice sang anyways.
How they wanted us to forget,
how we didn't yet.
How my body fits with yours,
how my ego gets in the way.
How ink is wet at first, then dry,
spots to tell the color of the cat.

I think that is what my dissertation is, is about. Though I don't understand that last line. Why does the cat appear out of the ink? What is it doing there? But I can't bring myself to change it. Spots to tell the color of what is, what is evident and present, as if we couldn't see it on its own. The cat got let out of the bag. That is what that line makes me think of. I'll leave the cat there, telling me the color of the ink, asking me a riddle, silently smiling. I'd like my dissertation to be like a calico cat.

On Rain, and Gardens

Rain. My pants are wet because even if it rains I still have to go teach those little boys English and even though yesterday, in preparation, I bought a wonderful yellow bike poncho, I didn't fully understand how to use it until I was almost done with my ride. You can put the yellow poncho all the way over your hands and the handlebars. That is what the poncho is for, in fact, but I didn't understand that until my hands were cold and my pant legs were wet. I was happy that the rest of me was dry, my wool jacket and backpack. I am now enjoying the relative dry warmth of my office.

October just came. I ignored the fall and kept on riding and hiking and writing. Or re-reading. Mostly I've been re-reading, and correcting, then re-reading again. Does it make more sense this time? Do I understand it better now? Soon I will hand in pages, I have already handed in some. I will hand in some more. Nobody cares about how much time it takes to make a sentence right. What I'm interested in now is finishing. I gave myself deadlines. I shared them with my advisor. But we are all busy with la rentrée and she hasn't taken the time to read them yet. That is just as well. I still have some time, to turn another sentence around.

I am wearing glasses because the doctor told me the computer screen tires my eyes; my eyes don't work together. The prescription in my glasses is an old one, and I need to renew it. But for now they will have to do because I can't afford new ones. I feel my eyes are protected nevertheless. My eyes were red and tired and itchy. I have a sty that won't go away, and a cold sore. The results of a summer of work? My eyes are tired of writing. My eyes are tired of the world. I don't always like what I see. I wrote a poem about that. It isn't finished yet.

Here is a memory, of a garden, with friends, after the rain.

In the Garden After the Rain

The smell of water on grass
or as it begins to fall
on dust and stone.

The precise movements of birds,
from limb to branch,
from tree to roof.

The dark light penumbral,
wet grass running,
the lightness of bodies
in the garden after the rain.

It may have been spring, it may have been the fall. I'm not sure anymore, but I forgot, through all this sunny autumn, how much I like the rain, even when I have to ride in it and I am wet. Even when I hate the cars, hate the buses, hate the city rising up and around, hate being pushed around. I love the rain, and I can imagine the world as one big garden. 

There is a Jack Gilbert poem I love about gardens:

Ovid in Tears

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”
he said, “there are places walled off where color
and decorum are magnified into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman,” he said. How like
a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives
and said garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around. Two rounds
later he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn’t read but still made a world. About Hagia
Sophia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped and he fell.
“White stone in the white sunlight,” he said
as they picked him up. “Not the great fires
built on the edge of the world.” His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”

I went to Marseille for a last weekend of summer. White light and white cliffs, the soft blue sea sweetly supporting me. I keep returning to that memory, as if to a garden.

I haven't cried in while.