Lavender

On Saturday mornings I've been spending a couple of hours at the campus "farm," an experiment in suburban agriculture: organic, sustainable, relatively small-scaled. There are a dozen chickens who produce a fair number of multicoloured eggs, of which the pale blue are my favourites, but for the moment--though there is a horse barn in the background--the main crop is vegetables that are sold to the student dining halls and a few local restaurants.

Yesterday my task was to help harvesting the lavender, a deep purple variety I was told was English lavender, good for essential oils, but not for cooking (that's French lavender and we have some of that too, it's paler in colour, and was quite ready to be picked). One of the farm managers gave us knives and told us where to cut it; we stored it in rows in waxed cardboard boxes, where it will dry. The next step will be to extract the oil. I brought some home for my closets.

The previous Saturday we had done some mulching and weeding in the sunchoke plot and then shucked dry corn, destined to be crushed and turned to tortillas. I gained a whole new appreciation for the labour-intensive side of tortillas, and imagined women in tortilla-eating countries spending their days clacking dry ears of corn together and ground the kernels in a mortar, as they watched their children and gossiped. I was ready for Mexican food by the end of the morning.

A Reading

When one of my friends here at Stanford heard I had published a new collection of poems, she had the generous and wonderful idea of holding a party for me, with our mutual friends plus some of my friends and some of hers. And this happened yesterday in the group of condos on campus where my friend lives and where we lived until a year ago. There was a woman I used often to pass and nod to, her on foot with a dog, me on my bike; the translator from Russian whom I'd heard never met. Our old next door neighbours came, as well as the man who moved into our former apartment when we moved out, with his daughter, here from Belgium for an internship. There were friends who'd come down from San Francisco with other friends. And lots more

I'd never been part of a private reading before and it was lovely: we ate and drank (champagne) and talked and then Marguerite clapped and everyone sat down and listened to me talk about and read a few poems from the new book, including three or four that were set in our condo and involved people or trees or creatures we all see every day. We all talked about poetry and translation, everyone chipped in. 

Voices from Chernobyl

 I reread sections of Svetlana Alexievich's book on Chernobyl this past week, and again felt its power. This collection of interviews, of testimonies from victims, feels artless but must have been written and edited with extreme tact to be so devoid of estheticism. You feel, reading it, that you are in visceral contact with the people testifying: Alexievich's authorial transparency is enviable. She presents without editorializing. The cumulative effect is overwhelming. 

Three pears, two apples, one orange

The essence of a blog post is to write a sentence and see where it leads you. It should not be longer than 20 lines. It should not be written elsewhere, revised and pasted onto the blog page. It should be (relatively) spontaneous (with the occasional exception for self promotion; cf, my two previous posts). It should not be revised. Well, not much. Though it is diary-like, it is not a diary, because it is written to talk to other people, even only one other person, or the one or two who will say at some future date, "Oh I read..." and you gulp, and try to remember what revealing thing you said. It should not be reread.

I am sitting at the dining room table. On the dining room table, which is small, are a pair of glasses; a white orchid that dropped its last flower earlier this week and will need to be replaced at the supermarket this weekend. My husband will add the potted, flowerless orchid plant to his collection. He likes playing with orchids. There is a box of chocolates I sent myself for mother's day; there is a fruit bowl containing one orange, two Granny Smiths (I know but it's the best I can do) and three hard, green but perhaps ripe pears. There is a book, the complete works of X, with bible paper pages splodged as if wet fingers have been turning them. Which they have.

Today's Guardian

I'm excited to discover my poem 'Polar Route' is "The Saturday Poem' in today's Guardian.  CB editions in London is the publisher of Hunting the Boar, my new collection, and the book can be ordered directly from CB editions for shipment to the US and Canada as well as to the UK. 

Hunting the Boar

My new collection of poems, Hunting the Boar, has been published and is ready to order from CB editions.

I've been writing some of these poems for the last four years, others are older, and many of them are situated in the south of France, where my husband's family has had a home for several generations--one great great grandfather was from the village, in the hills near the Mont Ventoux, and though he worked most of his life elsewhere, he returned to the village to retire, converting an old plaster factory /silkworm farm into a home.

The book's title "Hunting the Boar" is about one of our neighbours who, like other village farmers, loves hunting. Our favourite way of spending New Year's Eve is to go down to his house and have a drink with him around his kitchen table, with the mistral blowing outside.

Yesterday

We went to San Francisco yesterday to have dinner with friends. On the way we stopped to visit the Bonnard exhibit at the Legion d'Honneur. When we came out we had an hour to spend, so we lounged on the lawn out front with a view of the entrance to the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, and closer to us, a bronze statue of a nobleman (El Cid) on a horse leading his troops (presumably, no sign of them) into battle; we watched a series of bridal parties arrange themselves for photographs against the colonnade, and tables, chairs, fake flowers, speakers, musical instruments and a chef being unloaded from shiny white and chromium trucks for an event in the museum. The sky was blue, sailboats tacked under the bridge, the headlands glittered with cars, there was only the slightest hint of fog, though the fog horns were already blowing. We drove downtown past a playground where I used to take my kids to play. I felt no nostalgia.

The Train Whistle

I think there's a freight train in the middle of the night. I think I have read that somewhere, maybe in the local weekly, in one of the stories about the high school kids. Because sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night and I hear the train whistle, I think it's too early for the commuter runs to have begun.

The commuter runs begin at 5 am, I think, so if I'm awake and I hear the train, but the sky is still dark, it may, I think, be 5 am, and I can go back to sleep for an hour or two. At breakfast time they come closer together. They whistle because there is a series of level crossings, a couple in each suburban town along the tracks, north to San Francisco or south to St Jose. Then they are more spaced out during the day, then around dinner time, it's almost constant train whistle for an hour or two. They whistle to warn they are there, to try and keep cars off the tracks at the level crossings, which is not always possible, even if the barriers come down, which they always do. There are also warning signs: do not stop on the tracks! But I imagine that in rush hour, when the cars are bumper to bumper heading for the highways north and south out of Silicon Valley, and the drivers are inching along, maybe reading their phones, one might get stuck. 

There is a bike path along the tracks behind the health center, the shopping center, the high school. I ride on it a couple of times a day and sometimes the trains rushes past. It is a huge dinosaur of a train, like a train from another epoch, almost science fictional, compared with the sleek trains in Europe or, I imagine, Japan.

The whistles remind me of train stations in Canada, where one got on board in Vancouver and got off one day later in the Rockies (Jasper, Banff) two days later in Saskatoon, three days later in Toronto or Montreal, having seen lots of mountains, wheat, grain elevators, but not many houses or cities or people.  Sometimes a cow got on the tracks.  Once, when I was about twenty and travelling by myself to Quebec City for a French immersion summer school, a white-haired man took an interest in me and tried to kiss me on the train. A train trip was never something you did for an hour or two as in France or England. So, still, when I hear the train whistle, I think of going on long trips. The man had very pink skin and very fine white hair, as I recall.