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Bemused by the Bidet
Bemused by the Bidet
Today is our last day in Spain and while R works on his profoundly beautiful watercolor of a wine press in Gaucín, I’m thinking about bidets. There’s one upstairs that seems to be calling, “¡Venir! ¡Venir!” (Come! Come!) to me.
Nuestro Bidé Básico
If you’re a North American and haven’t traveled to Europe, you might not have encountered this
“…plumbing fixture or type of sink intended for…
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Rilke in Ronda
When Rilke set off on his journey to Spain, he hadn’t heard of Ronda, where he arrived, almost by accident.
-Anthony Stephens
We were heading to Ronda, a charming city in the mountains of Andalusia. I was blazing with excitement because the night before I’d read that poet Rainer Maria Rilke had spent a few months writing there, at the Reina…
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To Sheets! To the Wind!
To Sheets! To the Wind!
R and I are in southern Spain, wandering through Casares, an Andalusian village of white houses cascading over a couple of hills above the Mediterranean Sea. Across a parched valley of olive and cork trees, beyond the sapphire water of the Strait of Gibraltar and through a dirty mist of what one local told us is a broiling Sahara wind called levante,we can just make out the Rif Mountains of…
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Something to Crow About at Cornwall Park
Something to Crow About at Cornwall Park
What a delicious sound! It is not merely crow calling to crow, for it speaks to me too. -Henry David Thoreau
I like crows. Unlike that guy down the street who refers to them “air rats,” I think crows are cool.
I like ravens better, of course, because they’re bigger, scruffier, wilder, and in Fairbanks they like to pose for my photos at the dump and on top of Mickie D’s golden arches. As E.A. Poe…
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I'm Not From Around Here
I’m Not From Around Here
“Buck up, or stay in the truck.”
-Sarah Palin
Though I’ve never killed an animal and would choose tofu over steak any day, I do understand the culture of hunting here in Alaska. Last summer, my son-in-law, C, spent grueling hours “harvesting” moose and caribou in remote areas of the Interior so his family would have meat on the table for the rest of the year. He says it’s better this way,…
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The Scent of Rain
The Scent of Rain
Strange how memories are triggered by sensory events that seem totally unrelated. As I was in the Jeep with my sleeping grandbaby this morning, waiting for my daughter and Little r to emerge from a big box store with a load of diapers, the scent of rain brought to mind an image of my father and I doing rounds of his patients at Johns Hopkins. Was it raining that day, too?
I must’ve been around…
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A Singing Rose and a Dark Eyed Junco
A Singing Rose and a Dark Eyed Junco
“I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours… I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds… I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.”
-Mary Oliver, from Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
Woke up sad this morning for no apparent reason. Strange for me, a mostly joyful being, though I’m not one who has never experienced melancholy or even the dark pit…
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Postcard from Under the Midnight Sun
Postcard from Under the Midnight Sun
I’m back in Fairbanks and life is bright! This morning, by 3:12, the sun was already pinking the sky into bacon strips, and tonight our Interior Alaskan orb won’t even think of setting until 12:28 a.m., tomorrow. That’s about 21 hours and 16 minutes of daylight, although the darkness we associate with night in the Pacific Northwest doesn’t exist here in the summer since the sun barely dips below…
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On Not Understanding What the Clerk Asked Me at 7-Eleven
On Not Understanding What the Clerk Asked Me at 7-Eleven
It’s hard to believe that my son, M, has lived in Taiwan for 10 years. When he hopped off the plane in Taipei, M spoke not a word of Mandarin Chinese. In late January, 2005, after he’d been in Taipei for a week, M sent an email home. These are the first three sentences: “OK. So, if you ever wanted to know what it’s like to actually travel to an alien planet and have to learn how to communicate…
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A Riddle I am ocean spiral of ineffable incense reflection of comets on Sun Moon Lake bridge across the infinite chasm…
To Squat or Not is a Process of Elimination The Raifang Station chamber of stalls is a gallery of latrine-ic icons on doors inviting one to chose…
Alishan
Alishan http://wp.me/s3vxGC-alishan
阿里山
Alishan
Ascending the cold mountain by train
at an angle defying 4 am logic
on a morning unblinged by stars or moon
we tourists are stuffed and zipped
into cypress green army jackets
guaranteed
to keep all five hundred of us steaming
like the hot pots of jin xuan tea
we’ll sip at the summit
to honor the dawn.
Which reminds me of the poet
Han Shan
who
when he wrote
on a stone
or a piece of…
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Swamp Chicken Palinode Although my knees were wracked with issues that morning, I ambled along Fude Street with a sack of journals,
Burnt Offerings
In the afterlife
you might want
consider being a ghost
in the prosperous Da’an
or Great Peace District
of Taipei
where merchants burn
handfuls
of folded gold
money
in hell hot
braziers
to venerate
their ancestors
and secure financial favors
and
judging by the high-end
pricetags
at Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton
this auspicious
ember and ash ritual
has led to success for the living
and eternal…
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Morning Song My muse is not a monkish heron meditating by moonlight like Amituofo Buddha of Boundless Light.
Poet Emily Dickinson Reflects on the Lanes and Alleys of Taipei
Poet Emily Dickinson Reflects on the Lanes and Alleys of Taipei
How public – those concrete paths – punctuated with rows of metal doors – potted plants – pink trousers and under garments – Don’t tell! drying in shifting shards – of sunlight.
I was Nobody! Invisible as an aroma unnamed – Fish sauce? A steaming pot of rice? A plump duck sizzling in hot oil?
Somebody! Anybody! to the thundering typhoon – of Mandarin around me – I roared.
‘Twould have been wiser…
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Emily Dickinson Lost in the Lanes and Alleys of Taipei
Emily Dickinson Lost in the Lanes and Alleys of Taipei
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