Feather light, feather bright

 

When I went out into the garden this morning, I found the dark grey  feather of a gymnogene on the grass. An unsought gift. The gymnogene (Polyboroides typus)  is sometimes called the African harrier hawk and  is found right down Africa from the Sahara to the Cape.

I have seen gymnogenes flying  above the fields in the valley quite often. They have three distinctive  styles of communication: a wheedling  and  low whistle that goes ’su-eee-o’; a high-pitched ‘wheep, wheep’ made near their nests and a rapid chattering ‘ki-ki-ki’. I know that there are gymnogenes nesting in a large honey locust tree two streets away.

 

But I have not thought much about the gymnogene because I am afraid of my small dogs being taken by hawks or eagles and so I resist connecting with larger raptors and predators. Gymnogenes raid the nests of weavers, swallows and swifts. The tarsal joint swivels back and forward and sideways, allowing the bird to reach into small holes.  They  hunt for reptiles, smaller birds and small mammals. My dogs are just the right size for a tasty meal and as the dogs play on the grass I scan the skies over the garden anxiously for signs of large hawks swooping in. In reality I know a falcon or hawk coming in to attack would move like a flash and there would not be time for me to do anything. But it is a beautiful bird with its white belly and pale grey barred colouring, that regal and fierce head, the broad wingspan.

 

In mythology, the hawk is a symbol of visionary powers and guardianship. Perhaps I need to open my eyes and see what is there to guide me forward. Another threshhold, another beckoning.

Yes, I want to be touched

 

New poems out from Louise Gluck and I can’t wait to  get a copy of A Village Life. The poems read like short stories, compressed and lyrical but open to more narrative than her old work. I want to take a handful of her new poems and go out into the garden and read them in the shade  of a Brazilian tipuana tree, drinking iced tea and eating peaches and letting the magic work in me, slowly.

 

At the Dance

Twice a year we hung the Christmas lights—
at Christmas for our Lord’s birth, and at the end of August,
as a blessing on the harvest—
near the end but before the end
and everyone would come to see,
even the oldest people who could hardly walk—

They had to see the colored lights,
and in summer there was always music, too—
music and dancing.

For the young, it was everything.
Your life was made here—what was finished under the stars
started in the lights of the plaza.
Haze of cigarettes, the women gathered under the colored awnings
singing along with whatever songs were popular that year,
cheeks brown from the sun and red from the wine.

I remember all of it—my friends and I, how we were changed by the music,
and the women, I remember how bold they were, the timid ones
along with the others—

A spell was on us, but it was a sickness too,
the men and women choosing each other almost by accident, randomly,
and the lights glittering, misleading,
because whatever you did then you did forever—

And it seemed at the time
such a game, really—lighthearted, casual,
dissipating like smoke, like perfume between a woman’s breasts,
intense because your eyes are closed.

How were these things decided?
By smell, by feel—a man would approach a woman,
ask her to dance, but what it meant was
will you let me touch you, and the woman could say
many things, ask me later, she could say, ask me again.
Or she could say no, and turn away,
as though if nothing but you happened that night
you still weren’t enough, or she could say yes, I’d love to dance
which meant yes, I want to be touched.

The week unfolding

 

Outside on the grass there is a new bird with a breast  that looks like orange velvet. I have been peering at this beauty through the kitchen window while surreptitiously thumbing through Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa. No luck. I hope s/he decides to stay in the garden. What is your name, you vivid creature?

The sweetness of small dogs — I cannot imagine my life without unknown birds and  my two bouncing puppies. Travelling with them turned each day’s trip into sublime chaos.

Will Mars be as large as the moon on 27 August and coloured as bright as a birthday balloon? We can only hope so.

I sat down with a friend yesterday in the garden that  is filled with an overpowering fragrance of jasmine and we talked about overcoming limiting core beliefs. Easier said than done. Opening up the doors of perception to the as-yet undreamt possibilities. I love Virginia Satir: ‘We can learn something new anytime we choose.’ I am lucky to have grown up in a generation in which women empower one another so consciously. The friendship of women has been my intuitive playground.

In my dreams, there are whales giving birth, calving, the deep blue waters like a birthing chamber, music flowing through those deep chasms. A new world being born, the sunlight and foam breaking open on the surface of the  wide bays.

Rilke: ‘All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.’

Orange is my  colour right now. The hieratic orange, indigo and black of  strelitzias in a tall glass jar, the coral of fresh scallops, the juice from  Clanwilliam oranges, the warlight of the planet Mars. Birds of paradise, sunstets, buoys out in the dark blue bay. Like Frank O’Hara I want to write a poem with oranges in it.

Why I Am Not A Painter

Frank O’Hara

 

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

New moon on the brink of spring

 

Returned from my travels into the desert renewed and challenged.  Wide and beautiful spaces full of quiver trees and towering mountain ranges and empty sand veld. Not empty at all of course: snakes, meerkats, skunks, mongeese, small buck, birds, a red lynx  on a rocky outcrop… But no human beings, no towns, no light pollution, no noise except for the wind blowing. Even my thoughts fell away out in that desert. The immensity of the Tankwa Karoo, Knersvlakte, Koue Bokkeveld, Roggeveld, Richtersveld transfrontier.

 

The nomad in me is ravished by silence. Such bliss, those icy still nights watching stars crash and burn and centuries unfold, my gaze on the abyss staring back at me.

 

And I came back to  countryside  hovering on the brink of spring and a trembling sickle of Leo moon. Snow on the mountains, blossom whiter than snow in the orchards, whales breaching and lobtailing in the bay. Yesterday I sat on a promontary above the waves looking at  the great barnacle-encrusted Southern Right whales who come in to the waters around here to calve each spring. They will be with us for six months and observing them in love and reverence is all the ritual I need at this time of year

Full moon in Aquarius

 

Got up during the night and found the moonlight streaming into the kitchen through uncurtained windows. Stood at the window looking out at the luminous garden and imagining  that same moon pouring down on the lonely stretches of veld where I shall be travelling for the next week. The area where I am going has the least light pollution  anywhere in the world except for outer Siberia.  (Yes, that impressed me too.) Japanese scientists go up to the high cold plains around Sutherland to place electrodes in the earth because it is so quiet that the tiniest tremors can be detected. The starlight is like a white bonfire. Perfect for rituals and reconnecting.

 

The full moon in Aquarius with the sun in Leo. For the moon, the Sabian symbol is a ‘train entering a tunnel’ with that narrow focus of sudden darkness and then light at the end of the tunnel, re-emergence after a swift passage or initiation. An arrow fired into a tube of blackness,  diving into the underground. 

Oh, and there is a lunar eclipse as well. Which is the symbol of things coming to fruition. My housemate who is as Scorpio as Scorpio can be  is dreaming each night of her dead mother, just as I dream of my father’s death. We meet bleary-eyed over coffee each morning and feel the ground shifting under our feet. We need to let go of the past, welcome the new, and open to spring.

 

For some years I worked in an office with eight Leos around me. The creativity was only matched by the arrogance and bossiness. It was a stimulating and infuriating experience: the energies of Leo are expansive and demanding and playful. Leo is all about passionate self-actualization. I have some of that selfish exuberant energy coursing through me right now.

And juxtaposed here there is the lunar aspect of Aquarius. A sign that is inherently idealistic and to do with healing and vision. Aquarius is the water-bearer, a feminine or androgynous (Ganymede)  figure pouring out water from a tilted jar, munificent and nurturing. Cold refreshing water splashing out from a terracotta lip. In the northern hemisphere, there is a connection with Lammas and the harvest feast, abundance and reaping; here in the southern hemisphere, it is a sign of winter ending and renewal, the sap rising.

 

Aquarius pouring the waters of life onto the cold hard earth, the receptive consciousness longing for  inspiration. I feel ambivalent  and uncertain about the journey ahead, the travelling into a desert that is paradoxically brilliant with spring flowers. A time of libation, the full moon in Aquarius. I have great affinity with the water signs, the dreams of  teeming oceans and rivers and lakes. Entering a tunnel is not unlike plummeting to the bottom of a well and entering the tides of the Unconscious, those watery depths. A time of cleansing and compassion. The moon shining back at us from the ocean surface, the path of the moon a bright ribbon across the waters. A good time for learning to swim.

A forest of talking symbols

 

All morning I have been clearing ivy, digging and raking and pulling out tendrils that threaten to choke the confetti bushes, the young myrtle and the Westringia, sometimes called the Australian rosemary, a bush with light grey leaves and pale blue flowers. Now the agapanthus and  a  frail pomegranate are free of ivy. I have another problem which has to do with  the bare soil and drying winds, the danger of frost. I did a  brisk little rain ritual but without too much optimism. Blue cloudless skies as far as I can see.

 

Even though working in the garden  is such a satisfying  activity, there is not much pleasure in it these days. I am enduring a  very slow and troubled grieving process and inattentive to what matters in my immediate surroundings. The garden looks blasted by frost and lack of rain. All across the valley  farmers are spraying new growth on trees to retard the  appearance of blossom and prevent  bug infestations. It isn’t a process I understand well. I have written letters of protest and complained. I feel powerless and useless and unable to protect  my landbase. I fear for the local birds. I despise my own ignorance but there is no information available and the farms are fenced and  gated. The labourers are underpaid and  will not risk their jobs by refusing to handle dangerous chemicals.

I need to connect more deeply and creatively. My relational context here is the land, the seasons, the people who live and work so close to the land. And the need to resist that alienating destructive force of industry and commercial enterprise that disrupts what has been here, what needs to endure.

My faith, my spirituality, is what I am, what I am able to do. To resist, to nurture, to protect. This too: I will plant three more indigenous trees in the back garden in September, creating and furthering the dream of a light-leaved forest. A forest I shall know firsthand and study as it grows. That I will propagate seedlings and take cuttings and  watch over safe places for chameleons and lizards and spiders. That I will watch the skies for rain and mulch the  dry sandy soil under young bushes and saplings, get to know the seeds scattered on the earth, gradually slip into the rhythms  of growth and struggle and ripeness and decay echoed all around me. That I am no more and no less and no different from any wild creature eking out its living here in this valley of granite and igneous rock and shallow pockets of soil. Listening to wind blowing through  blond and silver and tawny grasses, hearing the crackle of frost on stilled leaves, hoping for  soaking spring rains to  halt the dust devils.

 

So I work on between seasons, mulching and weeding and  pruning. Moving back and forth between invisible worlds and  chilled by the shadow of death, the  barren spaces of drought, the loneliness that no company seems to assuage these days. My hands stained with grass and dirt and tree sap, the fragrance of sunwarmed grasses in my nostrils, the great heartless blue sky above me that does not know itself as heartless. I feel I am digging a grave for my father.  I feel I am making a garden to celebrate wildness. I feel I am  just marking time until  the rain comes down again.

where love dissembles itself as landscape

 

A cold closing to this winter.

On a journey into town, shred of almond blossom glimpsed through rain. I struggle on with the mourning that withholds itself, the dreams of being buried in clay, my mouth stuffed with frozen clods of black mud, sliding into a pit, a grave, a well. My parents wandering grey roads apart and alone, guideless, unbefriended. As a daughter I wish there was more I could do,  longing to go out with a staff and cloak and show them the way home. Then waking to the fresh hint of spring, the promise of renewal. But not an easy time.

And it is a year since I left Wales and still pine for it, meditate on loss: how is it possible to lose what was not mine to possess? Turning in this season of grief and melancholy to the poems of Eavan Boland.

 

The Lost Land

 

by Eavan Boland

I have two daughters.

 

They are all I ever wanted from the earth.

 

Or almost all.

 

I also wanted one piece of ground:

 

One city trapped by hills. One urban river.

An island in its element.

 

So I could say mine. My own.

And mean it.

 

Now they are grown up and far away

 

and memory itself

has become an emigrant,

wandering in a place

where love dissembles itself as landscape:

 

Where the hills

are the colours of a child’s eyes,

where my children are distances, horizons:

 

At night,

on the edge of sleep,

 

I can see the shore of Dublin Bay.

Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.

 

Is this, I say

how they must have seen it,

backing out on the mailboat at twilight,

 

shadows falling

on everything they had to leave?

And would love forever?

And then

 

I imagine myself

at the landward rail of that boat

searching for the last sight of a hand.

 

I see myself

on the underworld side of that water,

the darkness coming in fast, saying

all the names I know for a lost land:

 

Ireland. Absence. Daughter.