Acts of Devotion

I have always been obsessed with 'devotional poetry', poetry to a sort of a God (not a Judeo-Christian one), but to something more essential, more intrinsic, more.... Sometimes prayers to the day, to each morning (Annie Dillard), but sometimes with more fire (Sufiism-- heartbreaking pyre, burning of the self for the 'other'..). Over the years I keep switching from morning prayers to a Himalayan blue sky to evening rivers of fire & wine (Rumi). In my ongoing collection of such poems (like strung prayerbeads), I have become entranced with rituals I cannot necessarily name.

from The Magellanic Clouds by Diane Wakoski

IV

On the very top
of a  mountain
I have struck a gong,
1800 names are written on it
and drop to the world like a handful of sequins.
1000 of those names are yours,
who take many shapes,
have many lines,
voices, breaths,
names.
The mountain is a rock.
The mountain is snow.
The mountain is my
home.
I do not know how to offer you
anything greater:
praise not on your ground
but on mine.

(from 'The Acts of Devotion')

Mornings.

Devotional poems,,, what does this mean? It keeps running through my head, devotional, marks of prayer, marks of offering. I think of such small sweet actions that can hardly be named-- a slight tilt of the head and pause, a raising of the hot cup of tea just up, just so, steam in the early morning light, smoke smudged across a shaft of morning light.

Here it is trains, and small birds that fit themselves into the squares in the fence, chirping. It is pumpkin pieces in the grass and squirrels, it is the dull rattle of hundreds of seed pods overhead. The umbrella tree overhead is haunted with friendly ghosts. The birds pay their respects daily, swooping in in giant curlicues and back out, in a whoosh. It is blue sky and no shadow.

Mornings are the best, the air feels fresh, scrubbed, 'newly minted'. There is enough space to insulate-- enough quiet space buffer to wrap around the windows I look out of-- second skin, second eyes. The birdsong creates this field, this buffer, and the breeze. The light that falls down from the top of windows is blue, and clear, and tinged with winter cold. It is stretched, and only blue at the edges.

I am trying to capture something, what?? When we make small bows to the morning, to the early parts of day, what are we doing? When we listen and separate each part from the other, pull studs out of the fabric, are we marking time? I think we are stopping time, for a moment. After so much heartache yesterday-- how to reconnect with my own power? How to regain, recapture a heart connection with the world? For me it starts with small steps today, small acts of devotion, small stops, small beats: blue like polished bronze in the light, blue with metallics just under the surface, blue washed over the soaped fabric of morning, trains, trains, round notes of birds like tiny metal gongs, shadows becoming sharper on the wall,, vines, grapes shrunken to the vine, breeze.  There is a distant hum of traffic, but here, here, here.... is touching my head to the ground.

tasting notes. (repost from 3/2/15)

My wine descriptions can tend towards the flowery... sometimes they become long poems that have little to do with wine.  I try and restrain myself. Usually I am able to bring my thoughts up just shy of overblown, just this side of ecstatic poetry. But I am realizing that the standard I should hold myself to is my own-- what does "speak" to me about a certain wine?  What shows itself to me, what is revealed, and how to translate a complicated experience?

Writing about wine cannot be strictly intellectual-- it is a translation through ebbs and flows of an experience. It is layered and sewn, pasted and glued end to end. And back to front, sub-soil through sod through wind to tops of clouds. I have been letting my imagination run away with me lately, and have been hugely surprised that my tasting notes circle around to the beginning, all on their own. When it works, they curve around to the beginning after running a gamut of thoughts, smells, memories, and colors. They become a stack of trace paper with drawings on each page, they become a cross-section landscape of a summer rainstorm turned to dusk in the desert. My tasting notes have the potential to frame all of the ways I have dabbled in the world, all the ways I have of  remembering things, all the quiets and noise, all the lights and the darks.

I've been trying to celebrate my own language of wine. My 'language' incorporates many different fields of study-- everyone's does! If there is Greek poetry in my notes its because I lived it in the mountains of Santa Fe-- wet sage and chamisa breeze through my book pages. If the trajectory of a wine speaks to me in curves and tapestry weights its because of countless hours spent walking through the dark and muffled quiet of Met museum storehouses, through dim lit picture galleries. Tasting notes have become a story-- an arc of sensations that curves back through older stories. I have smelled the powdery, sharp tang of high desert chamisa in a bottle of Foradori Nosiola. I have tasted hot chamomile-in-the-sun in dark sherry soleras of Sanlucar.  I am starting to celebrate the verbose and the sensual in my tasting notes, the trajectories and tangents because that is how I experience wine. It is pre-verbal, it is nostalgic, it is haptic and tactile. It is happening before any of these words.

I remember a man performing a Samuel Beckett play on a dark stage in Taos, NM. When we went outside after, you could smell smoke in the air, through sagebrush. You sensed that wood stoves were leaving thick, smudged tracery above each house, and the sky was pitch black. I think this is why I have always loved living in desert landscapes-- there is less sensory noise, the spaces are more open and clear-- they are scrubbed with soap suds and sun in the morning, and stain brightly from a few select markers.

My friend that lives in the desert of West Texas told me that one mountain range bordering his property grew out of an old sea bed, a huge limestone shelf that has eroded down through fossils, sea creatures and chalk. The mountains on the other side are volcanic, and ring with a sharp metallic sound. I watched a storm roll towards me in that desert, and tried to understand the gold dust that kept falling on my white skin. His skin is bronze from the sun, he sat under a burning stick of incense laughing, saying that being dusted by anything was sacred.

In my writing I try to pull at a thread-- without unravelling the whole cord of spun experience and sensation. If I am lucky I can trace it through wines-- I find the personality of the winemaker in the wines and it is astonishing! In Sanlucar I came to understand two different winemakers by tasting through barrels of their sherries.  One shone through her wines deep and quiet and shining in the dark-- a cold brook in the early spring. Another was loud and alive with yellow bursts of energy-- it was electricity and sea tang, burning in the sun, burned onto the crisp, hot sand-edge of coast.

Tasting the 2011 Domaine de Montbourgeau 'L'Etoile', (50% Chardonnay/ 50%Savagnin sous-voile, Jura, FR) today. Its a mixed experience, and somewhat confusing. This was one of my favorite wines when I first started working at UVA Wines in Williamsburg, BK years ago. It was a bit of a tough sell because of its salinity and vibrant sherry-like qualities. I remember it as tangy and laser-edged, clean but also incorporating the oxidized aromas and tastes of Savagnin under flor (chicken stock, turmeric, curry, tea leaves, sea-salt). When I started at UVA I had years of selling sherry under my belt. This was a wine I sold with zeal-- equal parts all things I loved about wine: clean, focused aromatics of an alpine chardonnay, and oxidized yellow viscosity and depth.

Today I feel nostalgic. Is this why the wine is taking me back to late Fall afternoons? Kicking through piles of old leaves, "after-school", walking home in somewhat meandering and lonely ways? The wine opened up with manzanilla sherry and apple blossom on the nose, pale gold and clear. What is confusing to my brain and palate is that half of this wine is sherry and half cold, crisp yellow apple aromatics. I can't seem to fuse the two. I want more of one or the other, not both. The wine opened up more to granny smith apple and blossom, & the purity of cold-pressed apple juice. There was a little yellow candle-wax in the viscosity, and slight yellow spice (curry, turmeric).

On the palate the wine became yellow sour apples, sherry tang sharp, savory & apple-turmeric spice. Do you see why this is confusing? It combines fresh and cooked elements in equal proportions. The body of the wine is a bit thin, but still very fresh. As I drank the wine it took on more savory baked apple components, and a curry powder (vs leaves). There was a hint of cinnamon but no sugar, baked yellow apples. And then the stack of descriptors congealed into a blustery late Fall afternoon: falling leaves, decay, cold wind, slightly sodden yellow fruit on the ground & dimmed aromatics.

The wine took on the shape of a cold, gray day that was spent indoors, looking out at the falling leaves and tree branches. There was a dusting of black tea leaves/oolong/tannin pucker and shorter finish. The baked apple atmosphere added a malty, vinegary depth and a tinge of dirty rainwater. Does this sound appealing? It is-- but not exactly the experience I was looking for. The brightness of apple blossoms folded into wet yellow flowers with a haunting of smoke and wet wood. Drinking this wine took me back to cold, clear, and lonely afternoons. It was the loneliness of childhood, of sharp experience, of watching lights come on in the houses across the street.

Winter-- to some--is a blue sky of steaming wine and nuts,
A fragrant punch, to some, of cinnamon,
Some get their salty orders from the brutal stars
To carry back to smoke-filled huts.
(127, Osip Mandelstam, 1922)

And again wild fruit falls from the apple trees.

Happiness rolls by like a golden hoop
Fulfilling someone else's will,
And cutting the air with the palm of your hand
You chase the sweetness of Spring.
(from 123, Osip Mandelstam, 1920)

Elohim Creating Adam, William Blake, 1795

The face of the waters

    

I woke to fog, & myself this morning. My mind is the bird that flits from rock to rock and does not rest. It is the fly that lights, alights but cannot find purchase. I feel the flame of my mind like a candle being blown roughly, the smoke of it is ragged and blown, the center eludes. I try and focus my mind through the prism of this poem, find some relief in the description of a space—(a shock of air hanging between two masses?), a cool, clear defined block of airs that moves fitfully but is contained within a clear geographic skin…

‘The same mist hangs in thin layers

among the valleys and gorges of the mainland

like rotting snow-ice sucked away

almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift

among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack—

dull, dead, deep peacock-colors,

each riser distinguished from the next

by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,

alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.’

(from “Cape Breton”, by Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979)

When I read this, reread this,,, it changes, it moves. I find relief in this somehow—while other parts of her poem are rockbound/landbound, anchored,, this is a breath—a movement of air over waters. I always seem to think back to William Blake on mornings like this. I remember seeing a set of his drawings at the old Tate Gallery in London, drawings of the most urgent kind, drawings on Biblical themes. His drawing of God’s Creation of the world has always stuck in my mind.. an illustration of that first spark of life. His treatment of this moment seem to tease at the difficulty of it-- like my mind today—he lights like a pinprick on it and flits up again in seaspray, unable to easily describe it. I am unmoved by so much Biblical history/description, but felt completely awash in the lushness and crystalline depths of these moments illustrated and written about by Blake.

And the troubled rumblings of Creation: ‘The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters…(Genesis 1:2, translation chosen by M Greenberg in “Speak Silence: Rhetoric and Culture in Blake’s Poetical Sketches”)”God moves over the waters, God’s face was on the waters’.. the very first spark of creation was a face over dark waters, the first action a ‘breath’. The thing I cannot wrap my mind around, the thing that pulls at my gut, is the deepness of those waters, the sheer obsidian darkness of waters that were endlessly packed, receding, & unnamed. They were ‘mass’ of uncreated lands, but the stuff was all there! 

With desperate wrangling, I remember trying to translate a Greek version of the Old Testament myself into English, & remember the sheer insanity of this. Greek is big—encompassing, whole & entire—trying to piecemeal it into the minute sections and chopped fragments of modern English seemed impossible--- but ..”God.. moved// on the face of the waters..” seemed as close as one could get… to the moments, the string of moments that were marking, starting to mark time/place/action/thing. The whirling before was unquantifiable mass, and then a blush became apparent on the skin of the dark water, a lighter shade that could speak of itself in single, against the massive ‘other’.

This smudge of ‘first’ was made by an action—an action of looking, an action of closeness—a breathing, like someone breathing hot breath over ice on a winter windowpane. Something appeared there on the skin of the water—just there, that was new—the matter ‘became’ in response to the action, the ‘something’ grew out of the water like a bloom, rising up to meet such a close and fevered caress.

Am old Polaroid falls out of my book, my mother and I in matching coral colored dresses—me at 2 ½ years old, eyes closed, her smiling. She and I do not speak right now—mostly this seems appropriate and like a huge sigh of relief. But I feel the dark undertow of it, in the bottom part of my heart—maybe a marking of something generically unnatural or sad—sad in the whole but not the specific—sad in the overarching sky but not in my lone self, pinpricked into the dark hill of today.

I spent time with my friend last night, the traveler, and heard gems and rock strata in the things he said. His movements right now are marked by passage through sedimentary rock, they are marked by layers in the earth, by the ringing of volcanic rock, by mountain colors. I am homebound, landlocked, stuck. But I try to throw my mind out like a boomerang today, into the night air, into the early morning air, into the spray of seaside air to see what it might bring back. And Elizabeth Bishop ends her poem “the birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts./ The thin mist follows/The white mutations of its dream;/an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks” (from ‘Cape Breton’).