Beans and Poems

Back in California, and yesterday morning I spent a couple hours working at the Stanford O'Donahue Family Farm. It was a beautiful morning (as opposed to the greyness and rain we've been having since we returned on Monday) and my task was to husk and sort beans that had been harvested during the autumn and spread out on a table in one of the greenhouses to dry. There must be a zillion varieties of beans, but we had five buckets to sort them into: black beans, larger, black and white beans (like little round dominoes), speckled, elongated, kidney-shaped red and white beans,  tiny darker red beans, and some white beans (not many of these, perhaps a mistake?) It seemed very Mendelian, all these similar but different beans, but I'm not a scientist.

It was restful: grab a pod, open it, aim for the right bucket. Eventually I could recognize from the size, shape and texture of the pod what colour bean I was going to find inside. It's a little like ironing, I thought, keeping your hands busy while your head wanders. I had a companion to talk to, then another couple of companions. We exchanged stories...someone went to feed the chickens and gather eggs: 6 green ones we shared between us, and which we ate for dinner last night, green egg omelet.

Poetry Review Magazine (UK Poetry Society) has a very generous review, by Carol Rumens, of my new book, Hunting the Boar, in the current issue: "[Beverley Bie Brahic] has the translator's sixth sense for intertextuality and it deploys it wittily in the mischievous interleavings of 'Two Varieties of Common Figs'...here the sex needs no fig leaf of metaphor. [...] her aesthetic intellicence fees her fasination with the human encounter...there's a new music in these poems, and while it originates in an oral tradition of story-telling, Brahic translates it brilliantly into the poetic line."

Out the window

A series of cold, sunny days. Mornings, I sit in bed

and read and write and look out the tiny, open attic window

at 1) high thin branches of the plane tree, with a scattering of brown leaves.

2) The ridge of the neighbours’ roof and their chimney; 3) smoke rising from a chimney lower down; 4)the Plain towards Caromb, hazy, tree-lined roads

meandering towards the town, that makes a low mound; 5) mist; 6) in the distant background the Luberon; 7) sky, blue with mares’ tails.

The sounds are traffic sounds, barking dogs, intermittently, a power saw, a small plane, footsteps below me in the kitchen—my daughter thinking about lunch?

 A fly has just flown in through the open window.

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Upside-down road

A day of heavy rain right after my husband painted the garage door and the garden gate. So they were still sticky two days later and we all got paint on our hands. It cleared up yesterday and late in the afternoon (that is, around 3) we walked to the next small village, taking the path up past the old lavoir and cemetery into some orchards and old stone cabins, then down into another valley full of vineyards, leafless now, but still with a few bunchlets of muscatel grapes clinging to the vinestock. We stopped to nibble. Someone’s hunting dog was going in circles, a bell jingling on his collar. No sign of the owner.

 When we got to La Roque we tried a new road back that someone had told us about, but ended up circling back to the vineyard valley. Tomorrow, weather permitting, we’ll try it from the other end. The road we took was called “Chemin a l’envers,’

the ‘upside down road,’ or maybe “back road’?

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South

We took the train to Avignon this midday, rented a car and drove towards the Mont Ventoux, stopping to buy fruit and vegetables and some caillettes and boudin blanc in the next good-sized town.

When we arrived in our village (which has only a cafe-grocery-post office), our next door neighbour had just come back from chopping wood. It’s what he does every year in December, after he picks his olives and takes them to the mill to be crushed into oil. It’s part of the annual routine: harvest the cherries, harvest the apricots, harvest the grapes, harvest the olives and chop wood for the winter.

‘But,’ my husband protested, ‘your shed is already full of wood.' 

'Oh,’ said P--, who is 90-something, ‘one of these years I won’t be able to cut wood any more, and then I might be cold.”

Birdlife

Elizabeth Bishop wrote a poem about a crow, and perhaps that is why they interest me, though they tend to leave my kitchen balcony to the pigeons. But the woman who lives across the street, as I've said, occasionally dumps a little dish of leftovers on a ledge of the church's buttress, watched, from a safe distance, by a couple of crows. When she goes back inside, the crows swoop down and pick through the goodies. Once they brought a chicken leg or thigh to the zinc roof out the kitchen door and cleaned it meticulously and left the bone lying on the roof. It's still there, a couple of months later. Sky burial, I guess, though it also brings to mind a wonderful children's book I may have a copy of, somewhere, about a talking bone. I wonder if the clean white bone on the slope of the roof opposite is talking, only too low for me to hear it.

I put a still meaty chicken leg on one of my flower pots, hoping to attract a crow of my own, but not luck. It was untouched a week later, so I threw it out. Meanwhile my husband has bought some little plastic pinwheels to stick in the flower pots and keep the pigeons away. I think I was hoping that if I had a crow of my own, the pigeons might not try to sneak back in our absence.

We are off to the Vaucluse this morning on a nice fast train, to spend Christmas with my husband's family. 

Soup Kitchen

In another life I could be a very good cleaning lady, I told another volunteer as we swept up after lunch at the soup kitchen on Tuesday.

In this one, I've been lucky.

Up late

after a friend's harpsichord concert (Art of the Fugue) at the Columbia University Paris Center in Montparnasse last night, with drinks after at the Tschann bookstore, a Paris landmark, open late, with tables full of literature and people browsing. Still chilly but sunny here, the damper air settling on the zinc roofs, and drying off more slowly than earlier this week. My neighbour across the street has just put out breakfast for the crows, that were waiting on the church buttress for her to emerge with her dish of leftovers. It's weather to be out walking in, along the quais, newly closed to traffic on the Right (sunny) Bank--but early, because the sun is down by 4 pm along the river.

A Quiet Day...

the kind I like best. A day of running errands, to the supermarket down the block, after lunch when it's not too crowded, because the aisles (I wrote 'isles') are narrow and cluttered and there are usually employees loading the shelves or pushing some kind of cleaning machine around...and around. I ran into my neighbour, the guardian of our building, who was remitting money to her mother in the Philippines. We talked about her son, who is getting a masters in business at the Sorbonne. I bought some yogurts, potatoes, lettuce, toothpaste and dragged it all home in my shopping cart, and then I gathered three books (Robert Lowell) and went to the Luxembourg Garden to read in a deep comfortable chair in a sunny spot with my back to the wall of the Orangerie, until closing time. It was frosty and nice, and gardeners were rushing about with leaves, piling them up, moving them, and mothers and nannies were walking in pairs and groups with strollers. There seemed to be a lot of twins, and one very odd couple: a very tall, masculine-looking woman with a stroller walking fast and her mother (?) very small and bent, trying to keep up and having a conversation with the infant in the stroller.

On my way home I went by San Francisco Books, a secondhand place, to see if they had a copy of Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men, about the Watergate Affair. I have a feeling the next four years are going to be full of opportunities for investigative journalism. They had a copy but it was a hardback first edition, so I turned it down and bought a detective story instead, and V.S Naipaul's Half a Life. I loved his The Enigma of Arrival.