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Valentine’s Day Story and Pictures of Falassarna

Sometimes stories are meant for sharing. On Valentine’s Day, I made dinner for Gina and I set out a few candles…romance and all. Anyways, one of the gifts I gave her I wrapped in tissue paper. You see where this is going, right? She takes the tissue paper off and sets it casually aside into the flame of a candle. The tissue paper ignites instantly and is flying up into the air alive with flames. I grab part of it and try to move it over to the sink, but it is practically gone by the time I get it there. Just a bunch of ash settling onto the floor. And the dogs have disappeared. No harm, but a heck of a display of fireworks!
***

Here are some pictures of Falassarna, which I mentioned in my last blog posting.

This is a picture taken by our friend (and tour guide) Keith. It is at a restaurant above the beach, which you can see just to the right of my left shoulder.

A picture of Gina on the beach.

A picture from our spot on the beach. This is looking west.

Poem for My Wife

There are many reasons why one writes poems. I have covered a few of the reasons why I do in my blog over the months. I had been working on a poem for a year or so inspired by a visit to a beach called Falassarna on the western coast of Crete. It was a really magical place, in my eyes, and it will be forever associated with me to a magnificent time in some of the most beautiful waters I have ever had the fortune to see. More importantly, I was there with the love of my life and we both, I think, shared the same reaction to this beach. I hesitated in even naming it for fear that any notification (no matter how small of one with my few readers) would lead to an inevitable commodization of this place.

The poem below tries to capture these feelings. I don’t know how successful I have been, but then poems dedicated to wives can be claimed as successful when it speaks to them. No more is required. (Falassarna means “thick sands” in Greek).

Falassarna

for Gina

In the cradle of your palms lift the sea
That shimmers with the sun over our heads,
Dropping from your fingers, tracing your wrists,
And whisper to me, again, how these waters
Sculpt time, birth beaches, conjure whole worlds.
Pinch your nose and sink beneath the ageless sea
Into electric calm, where only you and light,
Where only you and refracted light linger.
Rise up and swell the sky, harvest the sun.
Of the hours I have left, it is these sands,
These thick sands, the shimmering sun, your hands…
Tell me, beneath this sky, on this far beach,
Your lips wet with the salt sea to my ear
How those long ago hours harbor our universes.

***

My sister and brother-in-law are teaching and learning at Northern Illinois University. Thankfully they are physically safe. Sadly, many are not. Many more must deal with the emotional toll. My thoughts are with my sister and brother-in-law and all those affected by this tragedy.

Words and Poets

I just recently finished the Selected Poems of Karl Shapiro from the Library of America’s American Poets Project. Overall, I found Shapiro’s poems lackluster. Nothing really bad. Nothing really good. Just ho-hum. However, looked at from a lifetime perspective, Shapiro’s World War II poems are by far his best. From the 1960s on, in particular, the poems decline rapidly in quality. Some poets seem blessed to write ever better work (Yeats anyone), while some spend all their passion and talent early only to write junk later (Ted Hughes anyone).

Nonetheless, I found the following lines from Shapiro’s “Essay on Rime” interesting:

Words are as lives,
Deaths and mutations, and the poet learns
Through search for life, the biology of rime.

I like the focus on words as entities and that the poet by working with words (and living as we normally think of it) understands more fully the power of words. The “biology of rime” implicates words as living symbols, which they are as is evident in the addition of new words or the altering meanings of existing words.

This is poetry…words.

A Tale: A Poem by Zbigniew Herbert

Recently I sent a poem to a friend, and he wrote back that to begin with he wasn’t much of one for poems about poetry. The poem was not intended to be such, though in hindsight how he got there made sense. But I, too, am not a fan of the poem about poetry. Poems about poetry are almost by definition of interest only to poets, and that is not very appealing to me. Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” is a poem about poetry that is quite good (though one could argue that the topic is not so much about poetry, but we’ll leave that alone for now).

I have been reading Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry as of late. A few days ago I read this poem, called “A Tale”:

The poet imitates the voices of birds
he cranes his long neck
his protruding Adam’s apple
is like a clumsy finger on a wing of melody

when singing he deeply believes
that he advances the sunrise
the warmth of his song depends on this
as does the purity of his high notes

the poet imitates the sleep of stones
his head withdrawn into his shoulders
he is like a piece of sculpture
breathing rarely and painfully

when asleep he believes that he alone
will penetrate the mystery of existence
and take without the help of theologians
eternity into his avid mouth

what would the world be
were it not filled with
the incessant bustling of the poet
among the birds and stones

Definitely a poem about poetry. I am not yet sure if I like this poem, but it was intriguing enough to keep me reading it several times, to ponder it. In some ways, this poem is not about poetry but about the poet, which is why, perhaps, it is more of interest to me.