Tag: summer

solstice, binding

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You’ve picked quite a time to come visit. The weather ripples unseasonably warm, overzealous June heat usually reserved for dog days of August and July. Dog days: a phenomenon concerning stars and ancient Rome more than panting canines—the transit of Sirius, brightest star after the sun. This fickle summer arrives in solstice and swelter but has already been felt over and over, already sweat out through every pore.

***

[a small breath prayer, composed in motion]

Inhale: You are a great mystery, God.

Exhale: I do not need all of the answers.

***

Each day, I glide among constellations of my own making, webs linking others through mere perception; gaze and assumption operate like twin heartbeats. On the street, I construe, construct, and elude: passerby seen as best friends, father and son, a couple. How many times am I wrong? Naming for convenience, weaving fables in the absence of piercing truth. I do not want to build my life on such inaccuracies, these minute adjustments and formulas. But what else is there? In what other way can we know the world?

***

“I am content because before me looms the hope of love. / I do not yet have it; I do not yet have it. / It is a bird strong enough to lead me by the rope it bites; / unless I pull, it is strong enough for me. / I do worry the end of my days might come / and I will not yet have it. But even then I will be brave / upon my deathbed, and why shouldn’t I be? / I held things here, and I felt them. / And to all I felt I will whisper hosanna for goodbye. / It is sweet to think of myself, alone at that very moment, / able to say such a thing / to all that was my life, / to all that was not.”

—Katie Ford, “Psalm 40”

***

On the bridge’s arc, past flickering golden hour and pavement’s radiating heat, I felt peace with tender step come knocking. I said, Come in at last. I said, I am so very tired of fighting.

***

“I lay out under / A separate sun. Both of us are fine / With this. We picked our place / Under the lid of god and we shut / Our eyes to it every night. That’s what it means / To have loved goodly—to meet / Fate in a lavender hall and walk / Right past it, the white train quivering, / Nostalgia in your wake” —Camonghne Felix, “Why I Loved Him”

***

I am gazing at the meadow where little cousins sought fireflies, my fingertips raspberry-stained. I am half-sun and half-shadow, twisting away from insects—the ants that infiltrate the kitchen but shun cinnamon, doggedly swarming up the wall. I am reading words I have read before, knowing they will mean something else now. I am turning the page.

“How lush the world is, / how full of things that don’t belong to me—”

***

“it might be years / before you turn and stop, startled / by the sweet and sudden smell of sheets snapping / in the sun, and the drunken lilac, prairie purple, / blooming, by the doorway, because you planted it” —Marie Howe, “Keeping Still”

***

Ammi: known as false Queen Anne’s lace or bishop’s weed, a member of the carrot family, a cold-tolerant wildflower, that which constitutes the field; when its unassuming sap meets human skin in sunlight, it can scar and blister for months…

***

“even / a small purple artichoke / boiled / in its own bittered / and darkening / waters / grows tender, / grows tender and sweet / patience, I think, / my species / keep testing the spiny leaves / the spiny heart” —Jane Hirshfield, “My Species”

***

One day of sun, and the world is pure again—it has aspirations. My tote bag crunches rhythmically, the spoils of a picnic grocery run shuffling for space. I am here and here and here. I am far from where I envisioned; I am exactly where I started; I am where I am meant to be.

I am a shadow, moving. My presence here evokes an absence elsewhere, and I see my silhouette bob along the leaves and friends of weeds, across from the cemetery walls too high to climb.

***

“But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere, / and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds / with the wooden spoon, I remembered, / this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture / after gesture, what else can we know of safety / or of fruitfulness?” —Marie Howe, “From Nowhere”

***

On the pier, we nibbled snacks like unanticipated communion—a punnet of blueberries and a delicious orange olive oil doughnut, drawn and quartered. One of our napkins blew into the lake, scarcely a lake but a sea, though I soon leaned over to fetch it as we laughed and a watching man on the shore gave us an enthusiastic thumbs up. I have a theory that perhaps the world awakens at sunset; regardless, we were thinking more than ever of color then. You said I am the grey-blue of my eyes, notes assuring calm and clarity. You are harder to place, the effervescent orange and fuchsia of hibiscus and California poppies. Life is but moments: moments destined to end, moments destined to be lived a hundred times over.

***

Words scribbled, prophetic, in the beginning of May: “May something come of my emptiness. May the Lord make more of my emptiness than I could with my fullness.”

dewdrop architecture

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It is the weather for dreaming, for forsaking obligation,

for hiking one’s skirt above the knees, for basking in the sun.

Give me my girlhood again, freckles and scarred knee, with calloused bare feet and eyes bright.

I’ve read the dictionary through, and, all things considered, I would rather be a rainstorm.

***

“And when they fly an airplane, they use something called a gyroscope,” the old man explains to the little boy. The canal is blinding in the sun, and two women are paddling a kayak, chatting about a garden party. I walk without a sense of destination, passing sunbathers in parks and small dogs. It is enough to exist on an unsullied afternoon, to drift in spite of self. The houseboats bob gently, and church steeples rise above the fronds at the water’s edge. Seated under the bridge, a group of men are speaking an unfamiliar language as they eat their lunch, and I rest in the words I cannot understand, in the sweetness of language as muffled melody, free from connotation. And the Word was good, the reversal of polarity guiding me homeward.

Precession – a change in the direction of the axis of a rotating object, as seen in gyroscopes

***

We stumble over the term, squinting in the sun. Désindustrialisation. Cognates, but the cadence is different between our languages. “Deindustrialization,” I say to her, noting the crisp rise and fall. Then, j’essaie in French, syllable by syllable. The ending is familiar, but, somewhere in the middle, the word becomes unwieldy in my mouth. The mind falters. We are like children then, laughing and puckering our lips and slowly pondering the unsayable.

***

When I desire to unlock my front door with the glacial key, I must unpack everything else first—the lanyard perpetually moored in the bottom of my tote bag. Rummaging, then removing: water bottle, books, wallet, laptop. These relics sit in scattered array on the ground as I fumble for a glimpse of Monet’s waterlilies, plumbing the depths of receipts and tissues. My Eiffel Tower charm is gone; it fell off weeks ago. And isn’t it always the same? Before entering every new thing, I have to remove the old, feel its heft, examine what is left and why. Who was I then? Who am I now? What do I want? What am I carrying? I know how to twist the skeleton key now, the proper flick of the wrist. A trick that took me ages. Can you tell me if there is any other way?

***

Tell me what you know of rot. The phrase births from nowhere and haunts me for days, demanding tribute. I am scribbling on the back of an envelope in the hushed library. My feet pounding on the pavement. I am sprinkling sugar over sickly fruit. Plath’s wedding ring is up for auction, and, in the case of unlimited funds, I would buy the letter she wrote Ted on her typewriter: “A clear miraculous guileless blue day with heather-colored asters, shining chestnuts breaking from green pods (I wait till after dark to collect these) and rooks clacking like bright scraped metal; I find myself walking straight, talking incessantly to you and myself… I have very simply never felt this way before, and what I and we must do is fight and live with these floods of strange feeling; my whole life, being, breathing, thinking, sleeping, and eating, has somehow, in the course of these last months, become indissolubly welded to you… I love you like fury.”

***

I shelter beneath the canopy of giant prehistoric plants, maneuvering carefully to avoid the barbs and thorns that snatch. I am chlorophyll-stained with light in the dress with the mended sleeve. “You’re green,” he says suddenly with a laugh, looking up from the camera. An unearthly emerald halo filters through the leaves, and I sneeze for the rest of the afternoon, baptized in pollen. Seek me in gilded gardens, vines unfurling like hidden ink in candlelight.

healing: midsummer

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“I think that I am here, on this earth, / To present a report on it, but to whom I do not know. / As if I were sent so that whatever takes place / Has meaning because it changes into memory.” —Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth

***

Every summer, I scuttle down the front porch steps without shoes, propelling myself towards our gravel driveway, where I make my way tentatively over the crumbled, jagged forms of scattered copper rocks. By the end of the season, the soles of my feet become calloused and strong, and I stride without wincing, without any hesitation.

***

The thing I remember is the feeling of dirt beneath my feet. Stepping gingerly into the garage, looking for a terra cotta pot or the like, I had left my sandals inside. After scanning the laden shelves, I noticed a tin watering can with a withered brown plant inside. We quickly removed these brittle remains, and the budding green thyme plant nestled itself happily within its abode, supplied with new soil. It overspilled its bounds.

***

“All that matters is to be at one with the living God / to be a creature in the house of the God of Life. / Like a cat asleep on a chair / at peace, in peace… / feeling the presence of the living God / like a great assurance / a deep calm in the heart.” —D.H. Lawrence

***

Inbox (1 unread): “Dear Mattea, I am delighted to inform you that your scholarship application has now been processed, and you have been granted a postgraduate award in the School of Art History. Congratulations! If you have any further queries, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.”

***

Juneteenth: an annual holiday observing the end of slavery in the U.S. and marking the day—June 19, 1865—when the news of emancipation reached people in the deepest parts of the former Confederacy in Galveston, Texas. They had been free for two years. They just didn’t know it yet. Their lived reality didn’t align with the words scrawled upon the page, skeletal, black upon white—by a man who confessed he cared more about saving the Union than he ever did about slaves. On September 18, 1858, Lincoln assured an audience: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” No right to vote, to serve on juries, to hold office, or to interracially marry. Who decides what freedom looks like and when it is won?

***

Memento (2000):  “How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time?”

***

To the gentle baker who remembered my name after only meeting me once, the one with the gentle eyes, the one who insists that I take a box of pastries home with me after my shift so they will not go to waste: thank you. I wish the world was wholly made up of such kindnesses.

***

I am reading, and I am waiting. I am healing. Colette, Annie Dillard, then Fitzgerald. This chapter of untethered postgrad life with abundant time for contemplation has awakened me to the deep need for healing in my own life—in areas I thought I had already surrendered, in issues I thought I had processed and put behind me long ago. I have also had my eyes opened anew to the desperate need for healing and reform throughout my own nation. My heart is heavy, but this is no excuse to turn away. Each Instagram story is the face of a precious child of God we have lost too soon, a linked resource, a petition, a plea. So I read up on environmental racism, dietary racism, misogynoir, police brutality, and the intersection of race and mental health stigma. What is the difference between simply breaking and breakthrough? How can we make this last? What seeds are we planting? What will they become? How many will stay to tend the garden and how many will be left to partake of the fruit? I’ve been clinging to a quote by Rilke about loving all our unresolved questions so we can live into the answers. Lord, come.

Summer 2019 Goals

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As June quickly approaches, I have had these goals in mind for optimizing the rest of my summer. I am posting them for accountability purposes and because it was exceedingly beneficial as a first step to organize them here and articulate them in writing.

  • Write poetry daily.
  • Limit my social media time (collectively, on all apps) to an hour or less each day.
  • Prioritize reading books for fun in spare moments. (More books, less Netflix.)
  • Stay hydrated! Drink more water (and still lots of tea, of course).
  • Spend more intentional time with God.
  • Exercise consistently (gym 2x per week, skating 1x per week, and yoga/stretching/at-home exercises daily).
  • Attend NAET appointments 1-2x per week to (hopefully) knock out food allergies.
  • Maintain an A in all of my summer classes.
  • Research travel details for an exciting August trip.
  • Complete my internship work on the upcoming OSGEMEOS and Turner exhibitions.

Do you have any specific goals for this summer? Any books you’re dying to read or places you’re yearning to travel? Please feel free to comment below. I’d love to see!