Utah

We spent a couple days in Utah last weekend. Sunday was beautiful, deep blue sky, bright sun, and we went snow-shoeing up a creek between two mountains, where in summer there is a string of beaver-ponds (though possibly no longer any beavers, since the available tree trunks are now at an unsafe-for-beavers distance from the streambed). The snow glittered, the sensuous shapes of the drifts cast soft shadows, and we pushed on till we came to a fence marked private property, though there was, from the valley, no sign of a house nearby. Anyway, we were tired, the sun was sinking, and we turned around and slogged back. Snow-shoes are a very satisfactory way to get around on deep, untouched snow.

Monday we woke up to a blizzard, but still made it to the airport, where our flight left on time and returned to the Bay Area, where it was spring.

The strange satisfaction

of re-ordering one's bookshelf.

We don't have a lot of books in California. Most of them are in Paris: the ones I read in high school, then university, the favourite kids' books, the poetry. When we downsized there, the most important part of the move was planning linear feet of book-space, so that books that had been scattered hither-thither around various rooms. Eventually we had to close a set of double doors to create more wall space in the new place.

Then, two years ago, we thought it would be prudent to get our own place here, even though we were happy renting. And I went to Ikea and brought home a long black bookshelf for the long wall beside the bed. A poetry place. It's maybe a quarter full, but each time I go to Paris I weed out a few more books to settle here--a lot of Larkin? Divide them between my continents? Etc.

Last week I rearranged them. It involved separating the B's (a lot of B's, which include a collection of Bonnefoy, whom I have translated, and Baudelaire, whom I'm translating) from the A's: ie, moving everything down a shelf or two (a lot of H's, too, gave them a shelf by themselves). This took a week or so, and it was a pleasant distraction. Now I look from bed to books: the vertical ones, the ones lying flat, the objets (family photographs, empty tea boxes, a cage for crickets, postcards from art exhibits), and it is good.

Weeding

Saturday, a perfectly sunny day, I headed to "the farm" where the afternoon's job was to weed the student plots, abandoned over the winter, of the deep-rooted mallows that had invaded them. There were a lot of volunteers, some new, some from last year, including N, an Iranian-American, who came all last spring and summer, often with his wife, occasionally with his student-daughter. There was a Japanese man and his young son, and a group of campus students, plus M, the coordinator. 

It's like sorting beans, mindless, physical, satisfying, rote. Yank the weeds, bringing up the roots, heap them on the paths, fill a wheelbarrow and take them to the compost. Some people began loading mulch and dumping it on the paths, delineating the plots. Every now and then I'd stand up and look at what we'd done. By the end of the afternoon, most of the dozen or so plots had been weeded, forked over, seeded with a cover crop and, in some case, covered with weeds to keep the birds off. Among the weeds I'd found a few leeks and a couple of lettuces to take home for supper.

N said he was supposed to go to Iran next week for business, but his company was looking into whether that was still feasible. He has double citizenship; maybe he shouldn't risk leaving the country.

Cakes and Emily

 A friend, Ditta Baron Hoeber, has a wonderfully meandering, complex, humorous poem online at the moment. It's called "Cakes and Emily." Ditta, whom I met years ago at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, is also a visual artist whose website I love to explore.

Marches

In October 1967, when I was a student at Columbia University, a bunch of us piled into a friend's old car and went to Washington for the March on the Pentagon. My friends were from Chicago; I was Canadian, just back from a two-year stint as a volunteer teacher in Ghana, where I witnessed my first political marches following Nkrumah's overthrow--brightly coloured, with lots of music and dancing (in Ghana, even funeral colors are bright). I went along to Washington pretty much by accident, not knowing a whole lot about U.S. politics at the time. I'm glad I was there. It was one of those historical moments. 

Last night I stood in the rain with a couple hundred other people on the edge of El Camino Real, a local prelude to today's Women's Marches in Washington and elsewhere. My sign said Not My President on one side and Love Trumps Hate on the other. In red and black. (I've seen some terrific signs in the news stories, including Grab your own). There were lots of kids and their parents, a drummer, and cars driving by honked happily. The March in Washington looks awesome and I wish I were there: this time I'd have been a fully-committed demonstrator.

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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