After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard

Beneath Blooms (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside 

to the Dwarf Orchard

Charles Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
                                         looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
                       I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
                  Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
                                           up from the damp grass.
Into the world’s tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

" The stars/are not yet bells"

Something Like the Moon (M.A. Reilly, The Badlands. 2010)

Summer

Mark Strand, 1934

1

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.


2

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.


3

My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures --
the mouse and the swift -- will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

At the Greenhouse

Greenhouse Study I (6.12.11)

I had walked across wide unmowed lawns and up worn stone steps covered with a tangle of weeds and found a large greenhouse with no one about.  Here the smell of honeysuckle spilling over stone walls was thick.  Approaching the greenhouse, I wondered if it had been abandoned as it was weathered and the white paint that covered the wood and windows, a careless painting at that, had worn revealing glimpses of the inside.

The day was overcast, cooler than it had been in days and I looked about expecting to hear a Hello or Can I help you?... but there was only the silence of Sunday. I nudged the door open and felt the full heat of space enclosed and with it the earthy smell of things growing.  The windows that ran along each side of the greenhouse had been pushed open and through them I could see bits of green.  Tables filled the interior and held flats of herbs and geraniums, delphinium and potted fan palms. 

The space was filled with heat and the drone of bees and the sound of a dragonfly moving against a glass pane, perhaps seeking a way to get outside--to get beyond.


I lifted my a camera to make a record, to convey how I see and fail to see.

Greenhouse Study II (6.12.11)

Greenhouse Study III (6.12.11)

Greenhouse Study IV (6.12.11)

Greenhouse Study V (6.12.11)

Greenhouse Study VI (6.12.11)