Sugar Magnolia

Oppressively hot & humid at the moment, my mind's in a jumble. The radio on isn't helping, but I hate to miss a song I love. So I endure some that get on my nerves. It's that kind of day. Finished Christopher Benfey's Summer of Hummingbirds yesterday - which says a lot for it right there - it is very rare these days for me to actually read a book start to finish (though I did read the Joseph Cornell epilogue first). I enjoyed and admired the deft connections he tracked and pinned (what's "lepidopterist" for hummingbirder?) I gasped when I read the description (and glimpsed the photo) of happily newlywed (in late life) Mr. and Mrs. Martin Heade - Mrs. H. feeding a hummingbird from her hand. Just perfect! I wish the book had had many more accompanying illustrations - Benfey's tour and descriptions were painterly, and often referred to paintings - for example, to a particularly voluptuous description of a series of Martin Johnson Heade studies of magnolias - and no image! From pages 238-239:

.... What strikes one most forcefully in the photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Heade that have survived is the unmistakable note of privacy in their Florida arrangements, of a shared intimate life kept to themselves. Nowhere is the private note more poignantly sounded than in Heade's late, great series of paintings of magnolias. Magnolias too had been enlisted in the public image of Florida and its hotel-world... But Heade was after something entirely different in his paintings of magnolia blossoms arrayed on blue and red velvet cloth. The paintings are unmistakably erotic, as John Baur noted in his pioneering article of 1954: "the fleshy whiteness of magnolia blossoms startlingly arrayed on sumptuous red velvet like odalisques on a couch." Robert Smith took the idea further, finding "an aura of post-coital dishabille" in the reclining blossoms. These paintings hint of a private realm, velvet-enshrouded, and one that is temporary and transient, evanescent like the magnolia itself.

Absent an image of the Heade my mind supplies its own association:

***

Sealed with a kiss, darling. Hope all is well with you. Hitting send.

I'm an Animal

No glimpse of Tom the Handyman today but hope springs eternal. He made me laugh. Nice wall - that'll screen out the highway noises. That's the plan. Thank you KZE for playing Stella a little while ago. I was out walking and missed it but appreciate it all the same. I have a fantasy of encountering a good looking stranger who asks my name. Stella the Aah-tist, I say, saying the word with a Boston accent, the way David Gray sings it. What do you do? I write. What? Poetic love letters. Loss, longing. Blog equivalent of the blues. Janis Joplin. Rosé though, not bourbon. Lilacs - I like the way those things smell. Yeah. Here - inhale. What I should have said. Oh emissary brain why must you always lose my chance? I kept walking. I could have stopped! How sweet it might have been to pause in the middle of the road on the innocent sunlit day, extend my arm, observe him inhale, create a memory, make his day. It won't happen again, not that way, the lilacs are almost done. Inhaling lilacs - what I'm doing now. They're on my desk and the fragrance steals over me. I experienced an olfactory dream last night, the most delicious sensation in my sleep, scent applied after her bath by a beautiful lover, unfortunately not me, but I inhaled as she passed. She entered the bedroom to meet her waiting lover and shut the door behind. Oh intoxicating fragrance and lucky man to behold the pale gray satin she had slipped on just for him, feathery white ornament in her soft dark hair, sandals on her feet, and the bouquet about her, fragrance of Parisian design, not innocent as a nosegay, muguets des bois or French lilacs, but a consciously applied pheromone to love, explicitly designed to draw him in...

reinvented, redefined

I could go for a ride on your sweet jelly roll... - Oh my.
Nina Simone, Jelly Roll
***
A phrase from a song has lodged in my mind -
the Fury got him
I don't even know from which song today.
I hadn't thought of it that way
But I think that's what happened to you
You seemed so in control
opanowany (in Polish) - in possession of yourself -
Because it was hard to contain the Fury.
The Fury wanted out.
You had to go far. Rhode Island wouldn't do.
You loved me. You knew you wanted to come back
Someday. But it would take a very long time
For the Fury to play itself, wear itself out
Beating you up in the process.
It's why you've kept yourself concealed - one reason, anyway.
(I didn't want you to see me when I was smoking too much,
and drinking - too much too - and so bad in combo.)
So there was no rush on either of our parts to see one another
Fallen.
But now - the future holds the possibility of something
quite, quite different.
Sweet jelly roll, and sweet potato pie when you eat from the pan.

perpetually starting notes to you

4-ish. Dearest, I'm up in the aerie, eating slices of apple. I woke from my nap and just took a stroll around the property. The frog "pond" (size of a kiddie pool) has a lid of ice, but in the flower borders bulbs are poking through the earth and there are buds on the trees. We planted something on the order of 40 trees since we've been here. It's like a boarding school for trees - they're all young, not even teenage. But they are getting bigger and one day the place will have green shade. I wonder where you are, what you're up to.

5. My dearest love, let me try to write to you as though this were a private letter, just between me and you. I miss you constantly.

Music that feeds the soul, that feeds the right brain that's been locked in chains by control freak left-brain.

5:15. Darling love, It has been such a beautiful day today, spring is in the air - mud and robins at the conservation area, bulbs poking through the earth here, small buds on our young trees - they made it through winter. I enjoyed being able to wear lighter clothing on my walk today, my breasts, braless, pushing against my shirt. A luxury I can indulge in now while I'm still wearing a camouflaging fleece. Once it's t-shirts and bare arms - well, sartorial norms will be observed. But to return - it was sensuous to be so aware of my body and my skin and nerve endings as I walked.

I don't have much to report. Breakfast was an omelet with mushrooms and goat cheese. Lunch was a salad of baby spinach and chicken left over from last night, with avocado, tomato and the last drops of balsamic vinaigrette. I drove to the conservation area and took my walk. I checked out my usual blogs, twitters, and websites. Read the introduction of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary. His analysis of how the divided structure of the brain, usually in conflict (rather than cooperation) with itself, in turn projects itself on the world -- well, brilliant - explains a lot, including our own personalities and inner conflicts, played out in the world.

Listening to music that feeds the soul. Later, dearest.

5:40 Thinking about my walk and how I surveyed the landscape off the beaten path, thinking all sorts of primordial thoughts of you and me, or maybe just the one.

6:10 A beautiful Somewhere Over the Rainbow streams... and I suddenly remember I saw blue birds on my walk today, in the field - not jays - bluebirds of happiness, the first I've ever seen -

the very hungry caterpillar

Caterpillar, yesterday. That caterpillar gets around. Saturday he was on the other side of the fence at the scenic overlook - thanks for making me laugh! He & I - a pair of Kindred Spirits.

Friday on my mind

Pollyanna sittin here in limbo
eatin stripmall Chinese
lovin you
I wish the man behind the drums
(you know - the big boss man)
would let my long tall texan go
pale horses couldn't drag me
from my dreams of you
car carrier dreams
of quality time food shopping
I'll pick up the change
not throw it all away
then walk in the park
for bird song
maybe spin by the new home
all through the day
in a gossamer haze of parasol ants
your love falls like rain
baby I love you
here I am
oh what a world
a mystery train
ah well respected man--
beloved--
your "annalee"

poking the fire

Dearest John, Maybe I just needed a little change of scenery. So I've lit a fire in the fireplace and am sitting on an old jacket on the floor next to the radio, journal on my lap. (It's gonna burn so bright - set this heart on fire.) The jacket is because the floor is cold, floorboards that D painstakingly restored original to this 1885 house. Pine planks. Southern pine? I have no idea. But I feel that I am sitting on the floor of trees that came up, were growing at the time of the first Revolutionary War. I like that thought - growth, renewal, recycling, restoration, reuse.

Now is an ad for Custom Forest Products, that builds to suit using local wood.

Now there's a song about massacre. I read once that in the 19th century and before there were so many birds in Pelham Bay that the sky was dark with them but that birdshooting on the part of the interlopers went on on such a manic scale that the birds dropped and soon enough the skies were cleared. Why this mania for destruction - the "triumph of human will over nature" as the NYT crowed about the blasting of Hell Gate's crags in 1851, and has basically been crowing ever since.

Earlier, Watching the Detectives. Now, I've got my eyes on you, I'm watching every move.

Ow. Word.

I'm looking for the someone I love. You're not here, and I care. Kisses, my dearest love.