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Poetry

Left in the Dust.

Want to walk with me? Meet me about 30 miles east of San Francisco, at the Alamo Oaks Trail, a small hilly enclave in the middle of suburban developments of the city of Danville, CA.

The hills are conscientiously tended to for fire prevention, grass mowed to a stubble, dry branches piled up for removal. It still has a feel of open nature, not manicured park, though, enhanced by the fact that I seemed to be the only soul around hiking the steep slopes.

The cracked grey dirt on the path visually mirrored the cracked grey bark of the oak trees, no bird song around other than the occasional chittering acorn woodpecker, calling for company.

Dust everywhere. Even though the oak leaves looked green from afar, they were coated with it, oak galls dropping left and right.

Brought me back to the images along the Interstate Highway on our drives, going south from Portland, going north back home all the way from SoCal.

Dust plumes whipped up by the wind, and more so by tractors and other farming equipment.

Which led to thinking about agriculture and the tragedy of all those 2.5 million people ruined and displaced by the 1930s dust bowl, following the late 1920s crash and subsequent Great Depression. At the time, poor farming techniques caused the soil to erode. A seven year drought starting in 1931, together with the erosion, led to desert-like conditions, unfit for growing food or keeping animal stock alive. When the winds came the dust was carried away in huge clouds, sickening people and depleting the once fertile grasslands.

Archival image showing dust storms in OK

Climate change brings, of course, increasing droughts but also increasing flooding events that make farming just as impossible. I urge you to read in-depth reporting on what farm families face these days, in the mid-West and increasingly California as well. Pro-Publica has a two part series that reveals how much farming should change, given the current and future conditions, but is stuck in a senseless place of doing the same old, no-longer-working thing, due to federal farm policies. (Part 1/ Part 2) The shortest summary: subsidies, including federalized crop insurance, are keeping farmers on land that is no longer productive. Programs that could help to pull out destitute farmland from production are cut by the Trump administration.

It is not the only problem farmers face (or berry-pickers and meatpacking workers — often immigrants employed exploitatively and with unsafe conditions, with workplace protections varying from state to state, never mind the current rash of ICE deportation.) Farmers continually loose access to markets as large companies buy up smaller, locally run grocery stores. (The following statistics are culled from an in-depth, devastating article in High Country News.) Four grocery giants – Walmart, Albertsons Companies, Kroger Companies and Costco – now control most of the markets, even if they run under diverse store names, which gives them power not just over consumers, but producers as well.

Farmers’ Markets are a desperate counter weight to these monopolies, but there are way too few to make a real dent (California has only 2, Oregon 5.9 per 100 000 people.)

In terms of production, 78% of the market share is held by 6% of U.S. farms, with ever larger scale production driving out family farmers. 1.8 million small farms constitute the remaining 22 %, many of them on the brink of ruin now with the tariffs. Farm bankruptcies already swelled under the first Trump administration, things are worse now. Up to 30% of Arkansa farmers are facing bankruptcy this year if not rescued by emergency funds (and they voted overwhelmingly Republican.) Expanding tax subsidies, of course, benefits not all equally.

Subsidies, once introduced to ease the pain during the Great Depression, now lead to overproduction and discourage innovation in farming practices.

Approximately one-third of U.S. farms receive regular subsidies, with larger farms benefiting more significantly. The top 10% of subsidy recipients receive about two-thirds of total farm subsidies, in direct payments, crop insurance and loans, often favoring large agribusinesses over smaller farms. They also contribute to environmental issues, as large-scale farming often relies on monoculture practices that can harm ecosystems. 30 billion $$ spent, but no talk of welfare queens….

With the new congressional bill, environmentally destructive overproduction of a few major food commodities, combined with stubbornly high and rising hunger rates, particularly among children, will be intensified and prolonged.

As reported by MOTHER JONES: “The consequences promise to be devastating for the economy, the environment, and public health. The BBB slashes food aid for poor people while showering cash on already lavishly subsidized farmers, mainly corn and soybean producers…. The new law slashes $185.9 billion from SNAP over the next 10 years, a 20 percent reduction. While low-income people got kicked in the teeth, large-scale commodity farmers cashed in from Trump’s bill. Driven largely by billions of dollars of annual incentives for all-out production embedded in decades of farm bills, farmers in the upper Midwest have maximized corn and soybean production in ways that have pushed this vital growing region to its ecological limits. Soil is rapidly eroding away there, and pollution from agrichemicals fouls drinking-water sources and feeds harmful algae blooms from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The rapidly warming climate makes both problems worse.“

Not yet taken into account is the fact that even monopolist producers are starting to feel the pain of Trump policies. Just as the soybean harvest begins, there are no orders – zip – from one of the largest clients: China. They account for 25% of all soybean sales and more than half all soybean exports.

***

There is much heartbreaking, perceptive poetry written about the displacement of farmers, and the yearning for a return to the land that they were driven from through a combination of climate, governmental actions and the results of ruthless capitalism. The land calls, in Hughes’ poem below, despite the evident hardship, promising the freedom of a migratory bird in flight, in contrast to the caged one, mired in poverty. (Best read in conjunction with his poem Let America be America again. It also compelled me to offer one of the two musical choices today, a wonderful rendition of I know why the caged bird sings by Buckshot Le Fonque, reciting Maya Angelou’s poem of the same name.)

By Langston Hughes

Smoke from 21 wild fires in the vicinity of Dunsmuir lining the horizon.

View of Mt. Shasta.

I was equally drawn to more modern allusions to the hardships of the dust bowl, by Steven Leyva, a poet new to me. Very much attracted by his determination to stay hopeful under the veneer of his play with language, encapsulating the vagaries of defense against what this world has in store for us, including existential threat.

What You Need to Survive Vernon, OK


Sheer luck. Dumb-as-a-hammer-
without-the-handle luck. Two-yolks-

in-the-egg luck. The fourth leaf on
the clover isn’t enough. Leave the rabbit’s

feet alone. Beginner’s luck. One
bounce of the Plinko chip into the bonus.

The universe’s casual lagniappe. Crossing-
the-platform-and-catching-the-other-train luck.

Even-better-when-late luck. Onion-ring-
in-the-fries luck. The penny’s street resumé.

Hard worn, back-country luck. The creek unrisen.
The anti-Lazarus creek. The-glint-against-

the-barrel luck. Luck to see the sniper asleep.
Oil-derricks-never-went-dry luck. All-sevens-

and-a-pineapple luck. Good fortune to defy the odds
of hypertension or hair loss. Arm of the lucky cat

scratching the air forever. Unambitious Icarus Jones—
boy was lucky as a broken wishbone. Oh to match his lack

of fear, his letterman swagger [All State, Triple Jump Champ],
his young, gifted, and Black luck. A palm itching, money-on-

the-way luck. An ear burning, willing-to-fry-anyone-
who’s-talking-shit-around-the-way luck. An ace in the hole type.

A rueful magnanimity toward what is out of control.
An ease with being at ease while the state becomes the dust bowl.

BY STEVEN LEYVA

And here is Woody Guthrie with the Dustbowl Blues.

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Don’t zero in on the Bees.

Too hot to hike. Too hot even for a walk around the corner. So I photograph in the garden, bees and bumblebees visiting the flowers in their late-summer state, a mix of full glory and early decay.

Not a random choice, of course. It all started with a book by Christian Wiman, award-winning poet, editor, translator, essayist, and theology professor of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

A compilation of diverse entries, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, finds ways to communicate the complex relationship between hope and despair even for those of us who do not share the faith – or any faith – so central to its author.

Part autobiography, part poetry, part analysis of the importance of a moral and ethical existence in a world where many have turned away from these criteria to protect their own comfort and/or lust for hierarchical status and power, the book instructs, challenges, affirms, and repeatedly uses terrific wit to make the medicine go down.

I was drawn to the text of someone as different from me as possible – deeply religious vs. completely agnostic and missing pretty much any spiritual bone – because I heard an interview where he voiced something after having undergone a bone marrow transplant, something I could not agree with more, having experienced serious cancer:

I hear that kind of carpe diem language — there’s a famous line from Wallace Stevens: “Death is the mother of beauty,” meaning that we can’t, can’t ever perceive our lives until we look through it through the lens of death, but if you look through the lens of death, then it’s suddenly much more abundant and beautiful and sharp. And I have come to think that that is just a load of crap. [laughs]

I was also drawn to what I sensed amid his profusely proffered doubts and tribulations: a steadfastness in trust in a higher power that I can only dream of, actually truly envy. I found his entries against despair in some ways helpful, nonetheless, by pure association, however distant from the core approach.

As it turned out, the title of his book refers back to a phrase in a poem by Emily Dickinson, A narrow Fellow in the Grass (#1096) which is the gold standard when it comes to describing a sense of constriction and fear, the encounter with a snake leading to tightened breathing and cold (zero) seeping through the bone. For Wiman, zero refers to other things as well, often in relation to despair, it can be a name given to G-d, or an empty soul.

There’s much to learn from his writing, much that spoke to me as an artist as well.

“Why does one create? Two reasons: an overabundance of life and a deficiency of it; a sense that reality has called out in such a way that only your own soul can answer (I create “in return” said Robert Duncan,) and in a simultaneous sense that in that word “soul” is a hole that no creation of your own can ever fill.” (p.73)

In any case, I assumed that I was not going to review the entire book (previously done by others here and here, for one), just highly recommend it. I tried to find a poem by the author instead, that would convey the central themes of his thinking, the depth of his way of honing himself, refusing to go under, if only with proud sarcasm (note that the last word in it is entirely ambiguous – it could refer to his first name, or his faith.)

Here is the poem: (and here is a convenient link to the scientific research that has shown bees to have not just numerical skills – they can count up to 4 landmarks – but also a concept of nothing (zero) to be a number below the ones they could identify. Bringing real world applications and insights into the framework of asking the big questions is something I found – and liked – frequently in Wiman’s poetry.)

Even Bees Know What Zero Is

That’s enough memories, thank you, I’m stuffed.
I’ll need a memory vomitorium if this goes on.
How much attention can one man have?
Which reminds me: once I let the gas go on flowing
after my car was full and watched it spill its smell
(and potential hell) all over the ground around me.
I had to pay for that, and in currency quite other than attention.
I’ve had my fill of truth, too, come to think of it.
It’s all smeary in me, I’m like a waterlogged Bible:
enough with the aborted prophecies and garbled laws,
ancient texts holey as a teen’s jeans, begone begats!
Live long enough, and you can’t tell what’s resignation, what resolve.
That’s the bad news. The good news? You don’t give a shit.
My life. It’s like a library that closes for a long, long time
—a lifetime, some of  the disgrunts mutter—
and when it opens opens only to an improved confusion:
theology where poetry should be, psychology crammed with math.
And I’m all the regulars searching for their sections
and I’m the detonated disciplines too.
But most of all I’m the squat, smocked, bingo-winged woman
growing more granitic and less placable by the hour
as citizen after citizen blurts some version of
“What the hell!” or “I thought you’d all died!”
and the little stamp she stamps on the flyleaf
to tell you when your next generic mystery is due
that thing goes stamp right on my very soul.
Which is one more thing I’m done with, by the way,
the whole concept of soul. Even bees know what zero is,
scientists have learned, which means bees know my soul.
I’m done, I tell you, I’m due, I’m Oblivion’s datebook.
I’m a sunburned earthworm, a mongoose’s milk tooth,
a pleasure tariff, yesterday’s headcheese, spiritual gristle.
I’m the Apocalypse’s popsicle. I’m a licked Christian.

BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN

And let me just get a bit of snark in at the end:

When I searched for the poem on google, the Search assist box popped up on top, as it is now wont to do. I never use these LLM for queries, forever raging at the amount of resources, water and electricity in particular, wasted by Chat GPT. An even better reason to ignore it: just look at the crap it delivers in the automatically appearing summary!

The poem: What looks like a satisfyingly irate tirade is really a call to recalibration. Shifting our focus away from self to soul might be quite the intellectual challenge, given how much we – I – have been tied to questions of the self, the way it is generated, mirrored in the approval of others, feared to be lost when body starts to rule mind, but it could just be an antidote to despair. Anything but what bees can and cannot do….. and if there is an intersection, it’s the one between suffering and the power of faith (whatever it might be you believe in.)

“Live long enough, and you can’t tell what’s resignation, what resolve.” I will cherish this line from the poem, during any and all periods of resigned or resolved eye-rolling!


And here are Satie’s musical vexations.

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Il Tempo Fermo.

I have been absolutely hooked on an album by Fabrizio Cucco, called Tempo Fermo. It unfolds slowly, getting more powerful with each subsequent listening, creating and simultaneously satisfying a sense of longing. It is sung in Italian, so you might wonder why I am posting it with pictures of Portland Japanese Garden, an altogether different culture. Well, depending where you inquire, the English translation of the title says Down time, or Time Standing Still.

That is the garden for you: it forever offers down time, a shelter from thinking hard, feeling hard, worrying hard.

It provides beauty, in so many different dimensions, differences in patterns, from whole vistas to the smallest details.

Light,

and color.

It offers calm, as only nature can do, even if nature is pushed into defined configurations by mostly invisible sources (from garden designers to the knowledgable gardeners, who one encounters occasionally.)

It provides the comfort of familiarity, a place to return to that greets you with old standbys, or that you proudly assess for seasonal changes, like the familiar decorations alternating across holidays in your childhood home. Except here it is not decorations, it is nature itself that changes with the shifting amounts of daylight and temperatures. Change that is of the essence, not some imposed by-product of celebrating seasonal events.

Visiting the garden, like yesterday morning, also elicits, on occasion, my hopes for the other translation of the phrase tempo fermo: time standing still.

For a short moment I wished for time to stand still, to be preserved, just like my photographs preserve my way of seeing the world around me. I wanted not to have to leave the hazy light of the early morning, the still cool air before the heat settles in, the company of a friend who relishes quietude just as much as I do. I wanted to put that moment into a piece of amber, a moment when I could still walk and climb stairs, when pain was perfectly manageable, when news were tuned out and my brain switched away from analysis to simple, grateful awareness of nature’s beauty.

I wanted to hold on to a moment where the world can still be healed, in theory, where gardens can still defy the challenges brought on by climate change change, where frequent outings are not a luxury out of reach. Time standing still, so that no more deaths are accrued on the battlefields, the regions of genocidal starvation, the areas of natural disasters.

That wish – Time, stand still! – is of course one that has been shared by many people across the centuries. It has been experienced, most often in the context of love, longing, separation. Listen to one more piece of music that encapsulates the notion – from the 17th century by John Dowland.

Then again, here is the thing: if time stood still there would be no music. After all music is an unfolding in time – we have to switch from stand-still to procession, if we want to experience that art form. Beauty, then, offered in development rather than permanence, in “becoming” – I take that as a major consolation for futile longings of halting time!

And here is yet one more perspective on time:

On Meditating, Sort Of

 Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?
 
Some days I fall asleep, or land in that
even better place – half-asleep – where the world,
spring, summer, autumn, winter –
flies through my mind in its
hardy ascent and its uncompromising descent.
 
So I just lie like that, while distance and time
reveal their true attitudes: they never
heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.
 
Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water,
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints –
all that glorious, temporary stuff.

By Mary Oliver

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All Kinds of Sisters.

You know how it is, one thing leads to another. This time it started with the birds, so many of them, different ones. The vultures dominated, though, hanging out in the trees along the Columbia river among the bald eagles and ospreys, all ready to swoop down, all eerily quiet.

Then I saw the object of their concentration, or, more likely, their desire. A beached sturgeon, still fresh, no visible wounds other than a torn fin. A spectacular specimen. Perhaps killed by the ever surging water temperatures and dropping water levels – that warming was one of the causes for the recent die-off of sturgeons in our waters, both in 2015 and 2019. Sturgeons can get to be up to 100 years old, but they only spawn every 8-12 years, so their populations are extremely vulnerable at this point, despite many efforts by states, fisheries and environmental organizations to protect them.

In any case, I had just read a book review that started with the phrase “a beached sturgeon of ungodly proportions,” a phrase I found enticing. What followed had me rush to put my name on the library wait list (54 holds on 3 copies – what are you thinking, Multnomah County library?) for The Hounding, a debut novel by Xenobe Purvis. Set in 18th century England, it describes the fate of five sisters who are accused to be witches or worse, having caused a “season of strangeness,” claimed to transform themselves into dogs, now hunted by their neighbors. They try to save that fish, to no avail, and a man eventually kills it by violently stomping on the sturgeon’s head.

Apparently – again, I have yet to read it – many literary examples of sisters are invoked, from Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park to Hester Prynne. The main theme, though, seems to be the traditional one: the way society treats women, assigns them magical powers for which they are subsequently prosecuted, harms them by clinging to beliefs of malevolent witchcraft. And this brings me to a book about a different group of siblings that I just finished, The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri.

It is a long, complicated novel, with constant shifts in time and several narrators, one of whom, the single male and potential half-brother to Ina, Evelyn and Anastasia, increasingly reveals himself to be quite the unreliable chronicler of the tale. Set in our own time, across Sweden, Tunisia and the U.S., its plot – if there is one, really – is also driven by superstitious beliefs in the supernatural. The sisters themselves believe that their family was cursed, and this guides their lives and decision making. The novel ropes us into deeply detailed worlds, both of behaviors and emotional interiors; it also makes it very clear that self-fulfilling prophecies interact with structural characteristics of misogynistic, patriarchal societies, exponentially affecting outcomes for women.

The book was not expressly plot-driven. I was more reminded of Susan Sontag’s adage that novels are education of feelings – they help us to escape the ever narrowing versions of ourselves, tied to habits in thinking and interactions. It certainly reminded me of how sibling relationships are fundamental to our existence, but their mechanisms are much more easily discerned when you observe other sibling relationships from the outside. In this case, the author managed to make each one of them increasingly more sympathetic, despite some being closer to me, the reader, in personality than the others. He also showed the futile or destructive power of competition, when they could have helped each other all along. But the novel’s real success lies in the ability to convey how potentially neutral or positive life outcomes can be thrown into disarray by the persistence of false beliefs, no matter how rational you try to be. Let that sink in.

***

I have one sister who I admire, and we love each other deeply, despite being very different from each other, but I also feel sisterly bonds to several of my friends. I thought this was described best in Adrienne Rich’s poetry. In the first poem, she alludes to a shared history (siblings are, after all the ones who know you longest and suffered the same family dynamics, even if in different roles), but does that allow you to claim true knowledge of the sibling? Is the stranger she uses as comparison really a travel acquaintance, or another version of the sister, or is it the poet herself, claiming we are unknowable even to ourselves in the end? Too complicated for my heat-addled brain.

By Adrienne Rich

Much more decipherable, then, and a hymn to sisterhood whether by biological bond or not, is this for me:

“Women”

My three sisters are sitting
on rocks of black obsidian.
For the first time, in this light, I can see who they are.

My first sister is sewing her costume for the procession.
She is going as the Transparent lady
and all her nerves will be visible.

My second sister is also sewing,
at the seam over her heart which has never healed entirely,
At last, she hopes, this tightness in her chest will ease.

My third sister is gazing
at a dark-red crust spreading westward far out on the sea.
Her stockings are torn but she is beautiful.

By Adrienne Rich

Here are three sisters sitting at the water’s edge, (no sturgeon in sight, alas,) on rocks of black obsidian. Obsidian is, of course, sharp volcanic glass formed by quickly cooling molten lava, used since the Stone age for weapons, daggers, spears and knives included, but also as ornaments. In the realm of supernatural beliefs, it is associated with healing, protecting us from negative influences. “Its reflective properties are thought to help us recognize false beliefs we may have about ourselves so they can be released.” (Ref.) Hmm.

So, here they sit, on top of those symbols of mostly violent destruction, and yet healing dominates associations. Stitching together a costume that reveals rather than masks you, vulnerabilities and all, being true to yourself, in public no less.

Stitching the scars of your broken heart, sewing as reparative action, such a familiar trope for women’s duties, but now these women mend themselves.

The third sister has gone far beyond: she can leave the torn stockings as they are, seeing the scab from her wounds drift off towards the horizon, self-generated skin a strong enough renewal. She might have fallen, but picked herself up. She might have been violated, but wounds will heal.

And given how most women I know see themselves reflected in one or the other of “our” sisters depicted here (on the mirror surface of the obsidian and in the hurt), this poem is a gift of encouragement and manifesting, with no further need for belief in talismans or other mystical powers. We might be fumbling towards repair, but we do have the power to heal ourselves.

Then again, being able to turn yourself into a dog on occasion, hunting with the pack of your sisters, might be quite the thrill, no?

I’ll report more when I’ve read The Hounding.

Music today is a phenomenal collaboration: Sisters doing it for themselves….

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Peaches

Last week I went peach picking. To reach the orchards you had to drive some miles across dusty dirt roads, arriving at a little farm stand in the shadow of a gargantuan oak tree. Acres and acres of peach trees, bending over from the weight of the fruit, to the point of boughs breaking off. A spectacular abundance.

iPhone pictures today – I did not want to be encumbered by camera while picking fruit.

I was the only one there, surrounded by the buzzing of hundreds of wasps and bees, all feasting. Was thinking about how these fruit are depicted in art, which paintings I remembered. Rachel Ruysch came to mind, her glorious still lifes, probably triggered by the fact that she has a major retrospective now traveling in the U.S. (will open August 23, 2025 at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston) and smart people writing about her life and career. This 17th century painter was more successful in paid commission at the time than many of her more famous contemporaries, Rembrandt van Rijn, Vermeer, Frans Hals and other titans of the Golden Age.

She was, however, not as free to pick her subjects as her male counterparts, constrained to painting flowers and fruit by fiat of her elders and other men in her life. Managed, though, to smuggle in the occasional reminder of the vagaries and dangers of life, in the form of sneaky salamanders, bees ready to sting, all kinds of eerily realistic creepy crawlies. And yet forgotten for the longest time, as so many other women artists.

Telling women what they can and cannot do: why would that remind me of the news that our Secretary of Defense, Peter Hegseth, reposted a preacher’s cry for the revocation of the 19th Amendment? Women should NOT be allowed to vote, was the demand. We have long known about Hegseth’s ties to Peter Wilson who advocates for a Christian nation and the need for women to be submissive to men, “head of household” in particular. According to Hegseth, women are obviously not welcome in the military, either. He has fired them left and right, all the while instituting weekly Christian prayer meetings at the Pentagon. But I digress.

If you look at Ruysch’s paintings, the peaches express hints of their extreme vulnerability, these fruits prone to bruises, splits, mold infestations like few others. Here is one she painted at the age of 19 (!): they are showing little scars and brown discoloration already.

Rachel Ruysch Peaches, grapes and plums with a dragonfly, snail, caterpillar, butterfly and other insects on a stone ledge (1683)

Rachel Ruysch Flowers in a Glass Vase, with Insects and Peaches, on a Marble Tabletop (1701)

In both paintings, she documents peach leaf curl and leaf rust; the trees are extremely susceptible to blight, which often leads to diseased fruit, rotting when still connected. At the orchard, the views of decaying fruit, on the trees and above all, or should we say below – on the ground, were upsetting. So much food gone to waste.

Some of the ones that had fallen were still perfectly intact, good for canning if not eaten fresh. I wondered, of course, if the help that used to pick these orchards in time, has disappeared for fear of deportation. A quick look at the statistics confirmed some suspicions: we have a significant shortage of peaches in the stores this year (down almost 25% from the average year), due to a combination of adverse weather conditions, labor availability and shortages, increased production costs, and economic disruptions, each intensifying the pressure on peach production in key regions such as Georgia, South Carolina, and California’s Central Valley. So could they not allow gleaners in, at least, collecting for the food bank?

***

When I perused painting of peaches, the depictions were, overall, divided. Many show the glory of the fruit on the trees or the voluptuous, velvety globules completely intact.


Wittregde Worthington Peaches (1894)

William Vareika Still Life of Peaches (1867)

Auguste Renoir Still Life with Peaches (1881)

Some reveal canning habits that seem to put the whole fruit with pit inside into the mason jars. Seems strange given the high cyanide content of those pits.

Claude Monet Jar of Peaches (1886)

Others acknowledge reality: peaches bruise all too easily.

Henri Matisse Peaches (1945)

Paul Gauguin Still Life with Peaches (1889)

And then there is Cézanne, always to be counted on when longing for transformation of a natural object into something altogether different, luminous from the inside, abstracted to its essence.

Paul Cézanne Still Life with Apples and Peaches (1905)


Compare this to D.H. Lawrence’s poem below.

The Peach

Would you like to throw a stone at me?
Here, take all that’s left of my peach.

Blood-red, deep:
Heaven knows how it came to pass.
Somebody’s pound of flesh rendered up.

Wrinkled with secrets
And hard with the intention to keep them.

Why, from silvery peach-bloom,
From that shallow-silvery wine-glass on a short stem
This rolling, dropping, heavy globule?

I am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it.

Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy?
Why hanging with such inordinate weight?
Why so indented?

Why the groove?
Why the lovely, bivalve roundnesses?
Why the ripple down the sphere?
Why the suggestion of incision?

Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball?
It would have been if man had made it.
Though I’ve eaten it now.

But it wasn’t round and finished like a billiard ball;
And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me.

Here, you can have my peach stone.

by D.H. Lawrence, from his Birds, Beasts and Flowers collection of 1923.

In this modernist (almost) prose poem, he insist on describing the perceived features of the single fruit in verisimilitude, demanding that we ignore man’s desire to make everything perfect, without nooks and crannies, slightly misshapen, indented and heavy – let’s take the peach as is, not round and unblemished.

I wonder if there was the temptation to read slight sexualized connotation into these lines, if it weren’t for the name and thus the reputation of their author. I also ask myself why did I remember and pick this poem from an acknowledged misogynist, a man full of rage and struggle, linked to a hard life full of poverty, illness and persecution by those who did not want his truth telling and revolutionary upheaval of literature to succeed?

Here’s why. He was curious about the world and courageous, traits I value above all. His travel writing speaks volumes to openness to the new, the different, to search and exploration, a keen observer if there ever was one. And the poem itself has that wonderful sense of defiance – “Hey, wanna throw a pit at me? I’ll even provide one, but it won’t change my mind that the imperfect wins over perfection any old day! Let nature rule.”

All of this, and more, I wish for the newest member added to the family, the day after the peach picking excursion. May he be curious and courageous, open and flexible, perceptive and defiant when called for, in a life that will not all be peaches and cream in this world of climate change, wars and the rise of authoritarianism. May he enjoy music (which I listened to on the day he was born) by a composer who shares his birth date.


István Szelényi‘s Sonatina is full of energy, resolves discordances always with an element of surprise, is full of humor and deadly serious at the same time. Good things to be developed in a new life as well, don’t you think? Welcome to this world, little A.

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Two poetic reminders.

The Trees (1967)

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

By Philip Larkin

Leave it to Larkin to imbue the glory of renewal with melancholic reminders that nothing will last, not even trees, not time, least of all we, ourselves. Even greenness is a kind of grief. And yet: here is a new round, let’s start from scratch, if only for this cycle, knowing full well that all cycles eventually cease.

Afresh, afresh, afresh.

It sure felt that way when I walked my first full round of 2025 at Jackson Bottom yesterday. Trees in leaf, wildflowers covering the pathways and meadows, dog roses climbing ever higher.

There were the last of the irises, the first of the asters,

mallows and forget-me-nots – and varieties of small sunflowers.

There were clover and clumps of hemlock,

cowslip and my beloved daisies.

The darn infection of my ribs, refusing to heal completely, made it painful to lift the camera, but how could I not?

Wildlife was fully present to greet the sunny day, bunny ears lined with blood vessels,

wood ducks tending their young,

as were the swallows.

Minnows darted around,

Scrub jay brandished a nice morsel, and the little guys tried to come into their own.

Deer was shy but present until it wasn’t,

and the crowning encounter was that of a coyote hunting, giving me the eye in no uncertain terms that I was interfering with his lunch.

***

That morning a local artist who I respect a lot for who he is as much as what he creates, had posted something on IG, with multiple comments of people acknowledging that they felt the very same way.

I certainly don’t feel like a coward – that would imply that there is the possibility of effective action and I were too scared to take it. But I do feel the same helplessness in view of the tremendous suffering all around us – I simply don’t know what I could do.

Then again, witnessing is a first step, acknowledging the horrors unfolding is a commitment to truth, and focussing on the fact that throughout history things have been evolving to the cyclical nature of ALL there is, helps to not succumb to despair. It is not just the living beings – whether trees or people – that die. It is also tyrants, war mongers, colonialist or generally oppressive systems that eventually bite the dust. Rome fell, so did the Spanish Inquisition. Stalinism is gone, so is Mao; republics have supplanted kings. Yes, some ideologies have only gone underground, ready to reemerge, and yes, there are scum who would like to reintroduce segregation and continue to use indented labor in the penal system if not outright slavery. There are those who pursue ethnic cleansing and genocide for clinging to personal power. But change has happened across Millenia, and human rights have surged in places previously very dark.

Afresh, afresh, afresh. Nature (and poetry) as a reminder that cycles will unfold, no matter how inevitable everything looks like now with power in evil hands. It will not bring back to life those who were brutally killed, it will not change our helpless mourning that currently colors every aspect of our lives, but a more just world can evolve along this historical spiral.

Maybe the artist’s simple uttering of those words allowed some other people not to feel alone, hearing sentiments that matched their own. That is the first step to build community that shares an assessment of facts, making us less vulnerable to manipulation of how we experience reality. There is nothing cowardly about the paralysis so many of us experience, but we have the choice to put our energy into hope, instead, and into local action. Do something for someone – here I cling to the words of Emily Dickinson:

If I can stop one heart from breaking

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

by Emily Dickinson

Jasmine sweetness was suffusing the air.

Music for walking through this world….

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For these Streets.

Must admit, I felt lousy yesterday. Not sure if I am coming down with the crud or if the regular culprits are acting up, fact is, I was in pain and I needed a boost. So I splurged, bought a new album on Bandcamp and can now pretend that my head spinning comes from some truly captivating music, rather than a shot immune system.

Not so many words then, today, to give you more time to listen. Just an introduction to the young composer who posesses what I count as some of my most admired attributes: curiosity and an integration of learning across categorical boundaries. Said more simply: during the isolation of the Covid epidemic, the guy devoured literature, poetry and film from a particular historical era (the 1930s), listened to classical music from same period, and then synthesized all of this into music for an octet. The jazz album has now come to fruition: For these Streets, by Adam O’Farrill.

His trumpet is embedded in a stellar cast, with Tyrone Allen II on double bass, Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Mary Halvorson on guitar, David Leon on alto saxophone & flute, Kalun Leung on trombone & euphonium and Kevin Sun on tenor saxophone & clarinet. So much talent in one place, often split up in sub-sections, so it always feels intimate, not overpoweringly loud.

So much insight, too, into the realities, despair and precoccupation of an era some 60 years before the composer was even born, now just 30 years old. From what I have read, he explored books about wanderers, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, describing the loneliness and isolation of the expat walking the nightly streets, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath witnessing the misery of the Depression (4 tracks echo this novel, Swimmers, Migration, The Break had not come, and Rose, like a mini Suite.) Virginia Woolf’s The Waves was absorbed, as was the poetry of Octavio Paz.

The track Nocturno, 1932 riffs off one of his poems, “Nocturne of Saint Ildefonso,” that is a contemplation of the evolution of one’s life time, a circular tale about origins and endings, walking the streets of Mexico. It is a tricky feat of temporal dislocation, embedded in the poet’s ever recurring theme of searching for one’s identity. The central square in Mexico City is focal, thus today’s photographs of the Zócalo and surrounding streets. Linked to at the end of the post.

The musician watched Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, and listened to various classic composers who found their way into his tracks: Carlos Chavez’s Preludes for Piano, Messiaen’s “Diptych,” Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major and Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” chamber concerto among them. Probably my imagination, but I hear late Frank Zappa here as well. Christopher Laws at Culturedarm has a more learned review. (I would not be able to identify the particular pieces, just the likely classical composers.)

This was a poster I photographed at the Hotel Majestic. My shots of the Zócalo were from their restaurant balcony.

I can only describe impressions, after just a few rounds of listening, obviously. The music captures some of the despair of the era, the hectic brought on by industrialization and the introspective quality of artists thrown into a time not unlike our’s, when big changes loom, and external forces close in, depriving us of the ability to prosper psychologically as well as existentially. But the album also conveys, besides the imagery of walking the streets at night in anguish, the freedom of walking through environments that stimulate you and feel like home. I used to walk in New York at night, during the various years I lived there, and remember that feeling of both, being safe among all those people, part of some amorphous sense of shared humanity, but also alone, always a foreigner.

Very, very grateful to this music for bringing back those memories. I am reminded of a freer, more adventurous, more optimistic self, instead of today’s aching crone who hasn’t walked at night in I don’t know how long. Must change that. Except here I’d be in the company of coyotes…

Then again, I am determined not to get sucked into reminiscence tunnels, leaving that to Paz. Here and now: a brilliant album by one of Brooklyn’s most promising young musicians. I feel better already.

Here is the original Spanish version and here the English translation of the Octavio Paz poem. Yes, I lied. More to read. I’m keeping up with posting long poems this week…)



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Transcendental Etude.

“Poetry is not a resting on the given, but a questing toward what might otherwise be.” – Adrienne Rich

A dear friend sent me a poem by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) some months ago. I have been mulling over it and tried to read up on the poet, going beyond my previous cursory knowledge. I thought about the poem again today (I am writing on Mother’s Day) because of the huge identity shift that happens when you become a parent. But it also applies to something that many artists, myself included, struggle with: how to progress, change view points, accept ruptures or even seek them out, so you don’t end up stale, but evolve.

The poem is called Transcendental Etude, and it is long, posted below in full. It is dedicated to Rich’s life-long, much younger partner, after she had divorced her husband and started to explore her lesbianism. The title is an allusion to Liszt’s Transcendental Études, a set of technically (eventually) extremely challenging studies that were composed across 25 years of his life (starting at age 13) and meant to build performing skills. They are also quite narrative, providing a glimpse into a set of images in time, and constantly moving, like all etudes.

Ken Hochfeld #40 (Series Leaning) (2025)

Rich’s mother was a performing concert pianist, until her dominant husband, a pathologist and department head at Johns Hopkins, put an end to it; he was a demanding and overbearing father as well, according to the biography I read, and both pushed the child into a life of achievement, with brilliance assumed to be a given. She played Mozart and wrote her first lines as a 4 year-old, no less. The poet later dealt in much of her writing with the issues of authoritarian dominance as a form of abuse, as well as the challenges to her Jewish identity, motherhood (it radicalized her, three sons before her thirtieth birthday, later renowned for her book on motherhood as an institution, Of Woman Born) and her evolution into a lesbian (her first, doomed, love-affair was with her psychoanalyst (ethics, anyone?), Lilly Engler, who was still closeted.

Here is a short version of her biography from The New Yorker. She succeeded early in life, surrounded by minds as brilliant as her own at Ratcliff (Ursula LeGuin among them), won publications and awards while still being rather conventional in the 1950s, then evolving as a poet, as the NYT obituary called her, “of towering reputation and towering rage.” No matter how difficult a person she might have been, burdened with chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis and the trauma of her husband’s suicide after their divorce, her intellectual curiosity and commitment to feminism are surely remarkable.

In any case, this is not about Adrienne Rich. This is about words that make you think about how life changes you, or, for that matter, your art. The first page contains lyrical descriptions of landscape, nature, man’s interference, and musings on the fleetingness of time, its short duration not allowing us full comprehension.

Ken Hochfeld #4 (Series Leaning) (2025)

The second page is more anguished: instead of being able to study our lives like the evolution of the Liszt etudes – from simple to difficult – we are thrown into the full harshness of it, after a few months of security at our mothers’ breast and lap, then nothing but wrenching apart and isolation.

“Everything else seems beyond us,
we aren’t ready for it, nothing that was said
is true for us, caught naked in the argument,
the counterpoint, trying to sightread
what our fingers can’t keep us with, learn by heart what we can’t even read. And yet
it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi
or child prodigies, there are no prodigies
in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn
cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are
– even when all the texts describe it differently.

And we’re not performers, like Liszt, competing against the world for speed and brilliance
(the 79-year-old pianist said, when I asked her What makes a virtuoso? – Competitiveness.)

The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.”

There comes a point, though, she argues on the next page, where we have to take ourselves seriously, or cease to exist. We have to be true to ourselves, in other words, rather than adhere to the scripts provided by society or fill the expectations laid out by others. We WILL find ourselves in free fall, but she argues that this fate was in store for us in the old ways of being as well – we have to take a leap into the unknown to be able to reconnect, ultimately to the love embodied by the symbol of a mother.

Ken Hochfeld #31 (Series Leaning) (2025)

And now we enter the most beautiful part of the poem: a description how we can integrate ever so many ways of beings, if we acknowledge how multifacted we are, rather than conforming to a single assigned role. I am the lover and the loved (agent and subject), home and wanderer (haven and world), she who splits firewood and she who knocks (the strong one and the one seeking help), a stranger in the storm, two women, eye to eye measuring each other’s spirit, each other’s limitless desire,” – all images of parts forming a whole. Remember, this was lived and written during the years when open acknowledgement of radical feminism and homosexuality was not yet tolerated as some decades later.

The poem goes on with a return to descriptions of what is in sight, but this time focused on the boundless ability to create – a woman constructing a quilt-like collage out of wondrous objects, natural ingredients, luminous colors. She is no longer concerned with achieving a masterwork, “something of greatness, brilliance,” but rather attends an integrative task, arranging bird feathers, wasp nests, shells and sea weed, among others. The bucolic descriptions of exterior landscape from the first page, marred by man’s destruction, now transposed into an interior realm, seemingly whole.

“pulling the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself”

The poem has a tall order, matched by a tall promise. Cut yourself loose from societal expectations, regarding a single gendered or professional role, as well as demands of outstanding performance/mastery. Replace with a discovery and integration of facets of self, despite the price paid for defying norms. Allow it to unfold over time, (like Liszt’s program of etudes) and you will be rewarded by an unleashing of creativity and the potential of return to the unconditional love of a female, back to the beginnings.

Tall dreams.

Ken Hochfeld #38 (Series Leaning) (2025)

***

As I said at the beginning, Mother’s Day was a trigger for today’s musings. It is hard enough to discover who you are and how to bring that into the world, if it contradicts expectations and convention. It is even harder, when a new role of parenthood dominates for the mere reason that a loved, helpless little being is completley dependent on you, and the magnitude of the task is both physically and emotionally draining. It is made all the more difficult by society’s rigid proscription as to what constitutes a “good mother” (or father.) I strongy believe there are many different ways to be a good parent, all of which have room to unfold only if you are true to yourself. Ignore the performance aspect – the need to please or to oblige – and work with what you have and can deliver. After all, if you want your offspring to be tuly free to be who they are, and have the strength to reach for that even if it goes agaist prevailing rules, you need to model.

Ken Hochfeld #10 (Series Leaning) (2025)

Which is, or course, the impetus for true art as well. When you start to deviate from norms – particularly established and touted in the community of landscape photographers, I fear – you are clearly in free fall, as Rich describes it. Today’s images by Portland photographer Ken Hochfeld are a gripping example of an attempt for new ways of expression. The focus of this work, Leanings, the way I interpret it, is on the un-seen, brought into being by what is visually defined – a seeming contradiction in terms.

“A questing for what otherwise might be,” as I introduced Rich’s writings above, seems to be an apt descriptor here. The threshold between depiction and imagination is increasingly permeable in these photographs, without sacrificing defining elements of photography in terms of spatial layout, contrast effects or composition. Strong, beautiful work, and an evolutionary leap from his previous output.

Ken Hochfeld #18 (Series Leaning) (2025)

Want to guess today’s music?

Ken Hochfeld #8 (Series Leaning) (2025)

TRANSCENDENTAL ETUDE

[for Michelle Cliff]

This August evening I’ve been driving
over backroads fringed with queen anne’s lace
my car startling young deer in meadows – one
gave a hoarse intake of her breath and all
four fawns sprang after her
into the dark maples.
Three months from today they’ll be fair game
for the hit-and-run hunters, glorying
in a weekend’s destructive power,
triggers fingered by drunken gunmen, sometimes
so inept as to leave the shattered animal
stunned in her blood. But this evening deep in summer the deer are still alive and free,
nibbling apples from early-laden boughs
so weighted, so englobed
with already yellowing fruit
they seem eternal, Hesperidean
in the clear-tuned, cricket throbbing air.

Later I stood in the dooryard,
my nerves singing the immense
fragility of all this sweetness,
this green world already sentimentalized, photographed, advertised to death. Yet, it persists

stubbornly beyond the fake Vermont
of antique barnboards glazed into discothèques, artificial snow, the sick Vermont of children
conceived in apathy, grown to winters
of rotgut violence,
poverty gnashing its teeth like a blind cat at their lives. Still, it persists. Turning off onto a dirt road
from the raw cuts bulldozed through a quiet village
for the tourist run to Canada,
I’ve sat on a stone fence above a great, soft, sloping field of musing heifers, a farmstead
slanting its planes calmly in the calm light,
a dead elm raising bleached arms
above a green so dense with life,
minute, momentary life – slugs, moles, pheasants, gnats, spiders, moths, hummingbirds, groundhogs, butterflies – a lifetime is too narrow
to understand it all, beginning with the huge
rockshelves that underlie all that life.

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
– And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.
At most we’re allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a woman’s voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman’s heartbeat heard ever after from a distance,
the loss of that ground-note echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.

Everything else seems beyond us,
we aren’t ready for it, nothing that was said
is true for us, caught naked in the argument,
the counterpoint, trying to sightread
what our fingers can’t keep us with, learn by heart what we can’t even read. And yet
it is this we were born to. We aren’t virtuosi
or child prodigies, there are no prodigies
in this realm, only a half-blind, stubborn
cleaving to the timbre, the tones of what we are
– even when all the texts describe it differently.

And we’re not performers, like Liszt, competing against the world for speed and brilliance
(the 79-year-old pianist said, when I asked her What makes a virtuoso? – Competitiveness.)

The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.
The woman who sits watching, listening,
eyes moving in the darkness
is rehearsing in her body, hearing-out in her blood
a score touched off in her perhaps
by some words, a few chords, from the stage:
a tale only she can tell.

But there come times—perhaps this is one of them –

when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;

when we have to pull back from the incantations, rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,

and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a deeper listening, cleansed of oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static crowding the wires. We cut the wires,
find ourselves in free-fall, as if
our true home were the undimensional
solitudes, the rift
in the Great Nebula.
No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry to which no echo comes or can ever come.

But in fact we were always like this,
rootless, dismembered, knowing it makes the difference. Birth stripped our birthright from us,
tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves
so early on
and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears
like midges, told us nothing, nothing
of origins, nothing we needed
to know, nothing that could re-member us.

Only: that it is unnatural,
the homesickness for a woman, for ourselves,
for that acute joy at the shadow her head and arms
cast on a wall, her heavy or slender
thighs on which we lay, flesh against flesh,
eyes steady of on the face of love; smell of her milk, her sweat,

terror of her disappearance, all fused in this hunger
for the element they have called most dangerous, to be
lifted breathtaken on her breast, to rock within her
– even if beaten back, stranded again, to apprehend
in a sudden brine-clear thought
trembling like the tiny, orbed, endangered
egg-sac of a new world:
This is what she was to me, and this
is how I can love myself – as only a woman can love me.

Homesick for myself, for her – as, after the heatwave breaks, the clear tones of the world

manifest: cloud, bough, wall, insect, the very soul of light: homesick as the fluted vault of desire
articulates itself: I am the lover and the loved,
home and wanderer, she who splits

firewood and she who knocks, a stranger
in the storm, two women, eye to eye
measuring each other’s spirit, each other’s
limitless desire,
 a whole new poetry beginning here.

Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap

bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,

laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow-colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away,
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow –
original domestic silk, the finest findings –
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and dry darkbrown lace of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
The striving for greatness, brilliance –
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright, silk against roughness,
pulling the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound; and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further forming underneath everything that grows.

 By Adrienne Rich – The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

(For sticklers – I got as close to the correct format as I could. There area few line breaks that are not entirely accurate. Couldnt figure it out in the word program.)

Ken Hochfeld #2 (Series Leaning) (2025)

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Voices of Remembering

A resolution to mark May 5th, 2025 as National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls passed the Senate on Monday. This was good news among a torrent of bad news regarding Indigenous rights. I want to introduce two voices today, who singularly inform, on an intellectual and an emotional level, respectively, about the issues involving Native Americans.

All images today by Nicole Merton.

Let’s start with the latter, a photographer and activist of Mescalero Apache descent, Nicole Merton. She focuses her photographic work on the MMIWP Movement (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & People) with cultural photography and recordings of untold stories, doing field work across the nation. Her photography depicts women who have payed tribute to memories of their lost loved ones, and their strength to stand for others who can’t. Within these photos there is a red hand print which evokes solidarity and a moment of silence for the ones lost. The symbol that has taken off internationally to point to the growing MMIW movement. It stands for all the missing women and girls whose voices are not heard. It also stands for the silence of the media and law enforcement in the midst of this crisis.

“For the last few decades there has been a massive attack on indigenous women of the United States as well as Canada, and parts of Mexico. These women have been taken and forced into sex trafficking, have been sexually assaulted, and some are murdered. Many have been reported missing with little to nothing being done about it. In the record breaking year of 2016 there were 5,712 missing women  reported by tribal officials but only 116 where actually recorded in the United States Department of Justice, the number of missing and  murdered women are still rising. A small percentage of those women who have gone missing have been girls as young as the age of 10. Native American women under the age of 35 are at a higher risk of being murdered than many other groups which makes it the third most prevalent cause of death among indigenous women. 95% of these cases never make it to the media, it is my determination to make changes and bring forth awareness, and to change lives.”

The images I am posting today come from Merton’s website, which has an amazing breadth of portraiture, but also from an exhibition where I first encountered her work, 1.5 years ago. Red Earth Gaze was shown at the Angle’s Gate Art Center in San Pedro, CA. Unfortunately I did not note the titles of the photographs, too immersed at the time in their emotional impact.

***

The other person of note is Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee), a Native American activist, writer, and public speaker. I summarize below information from her site Welcome to Native America. Her book By the Fire We Carry was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and claimed as the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year, an NPR 2024 “Books We Loved” Pick, an Esquire Best Book of the Year and a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2024.

“The author recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.”

Here is the current situation from Nagle’s reporting: Nationally, there are 4,200 unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people. Meanwhile, as part of the Trump admin’s purge of “DEI” information on government websites, it has taken down a federal report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. The task force behind the report was created by Congress.

Trump has unveiled a plan to close the EPA Office of Research and Development in Ada, Oklahoma. It is the nation’s only federal groundwater research lab. This will have disproportionate impacts for tribes, where the majority of drinking water systems utilize groundwater.

The Trump-proposed SAVE Act is heading to the Senate. If passed, it will disenfranchise millions of citizens, including Native voters. Under the Act, tribal IDs will be insufficient to prove citizenship and will require additional documentation and rural Native voters will need to travel hours to register to vote in person, or even to update their address or party affiliation. Check out Protect the Sacred, which registered hundreds of Indigenous voters in 2024 through the Ride to the Polls campaign.

***

I am always encouraged by the singular reach that people who passionately pursue a cause, can have. Once individual voices add up to a chorus, maybe the message will get loud enough so that it can no longer be ignored. The victims deserve it.

Then again, justice is not easy to come by. For Native women, murder is the third leading cause of death. Native women living on reservations are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average. 97% of the people who perpetrate these crimes are non-Native. Part of the problem is the legal gray zone of who is responsible for prosecuting these crimes, with diffuse criminal jurisdiction.

I am summarizing Nagle again: Tribes cannot prosecute non-Natives (the most frequent perpetrators) for most crimes. And there are legal limits for the prosecution of tribal members by tribes – even for murder you can only sentence to three years in prison. (Let us for a moment ignore the issue of abolition, ok?) The federal government can prosecute “major” crimes on tribal land, like murder, assault, kidnapping, child abuse, and robbery. The problem here is that historically the federal authorities don’t take up this power – over a third of all Indian Country cases are declined, and for some years the rate is as high as 67%, not pursuing sexual assault cases, for example.

It gets more complicated: as of a 2022 Supreme Court decision, all states have the authority to prosecute crimes where the perpetrator is non-Native, but the victim is Native. Yet only 15 states have prosecutorial power on Native land. And And finally, some tribes can prosecute some crimes (sexual assault, sex trafficking, stalking, and child abuse) committed by non-Natives on their land, but only if they meet certain criteria and seek and receive federal approval. As of 2022, 31 tribes across the U.S. had passed this hurdle – 31 out of 574. Confused yet?

And we wonder why crime rates against tribal women are excessive.

If you are interested in how contemporary poets confront the epidemic of missing indigenous women, I urge you to read this essay that will link to various poems.

Instead of music today here is a poem in audio form. I liked the way the words conjure up a powerful woman, not a victim.

She Is Spitting a Mouthful of Stars (nikâwi’s Song)

She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is laughing more than the men who beat her
She is ten horses breaking open the day
She is new to her bones
She is holy in the dust

She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is singing louder than the men who raped her
She is waking beyond the Milky Way
She is new to her breath
She is sacred in this breathing

She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is holding the light more than those who despised her
She is folding clouds in her movement
She is new to this sound 
She is unbroken flesh

She is spitting a mouthful of stars
She is laughing more than those who shamed her
She is ten horses breaking open the day
She is new to these bones
She is holy in their dust

by Gregory Scofield, Métis

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A Light exists in Spring.

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay –

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

by Emily Dickinson (Complete Poems)

My apple tree – lucky if we get three apples after the birds and squirrels have at it.

I figured I spare those of you not interested in politics today, by putting the poem out in front, accompanied by photographs of what is currently in bloom in my garden and the local parks, a celebration of spring. Enjoy her beautiful words that capture the essence of the season: light over darkness, rebirth, an ephemeral presence of something Holy, even if you’re not attached to Sacraments.

If you’re curious why this poem came to mind and how it is connected to thoughts about what is happening around us, on the other hand, read on. I’ll try to be concise and let the various links do the talking.

Neighborhood rhododendron

The poet warns us that there are spiritual things that science cannot “overtake” or measure, but that are rather felt by humans. I have no problem with that – I am perfectly willing to consider that not all can be explained by science. Before you allow those distrusting science in general to appropriate this poet, though, let me remind you that she also wrote in Fascicle Ten: “Faith is a fine invention / For Gentlemen who see — / But Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency!”

Science matters. We in the scientific community, but also most everyone I talk to who is not a scientist, are horrified by the current administration’s assault on all things scientific. What affects the largest number of people, the planet, really, is, of course, anything climate related. Policies weakened, rolled back, eliminated. Data collection abandoned, particularly where they’d demonstrate negative impact of climate change or industrial pollution on vulnerable populations (air quality, lead exposure), but also weather and dangerous conditions in general. Grants for research programs canceled, thousands of scientists fired for good. Research meetings prohibited, advisory committees dissolved, scientists no longer allowed to talk to “foreigners” (e.g. the research community that collaborates or the WHO.) Fire fighting and disaster mitigation curbed or canceled. Green initiatives kneecapped. Fossil fuel extraction resumed and encouraged, even in previously protected natural areas like our National Parks, and despite their impact on increased environmental pollution. Dickinson is likely spinning in her grave.

Daisies cover our meadow

Let’s look at health next. Again, thousands of employees terminated, including high ranking scientists and advisory boards. That includes the entire Board of Scientific Advisors for the National Cancer Institute. Brain drain, with many of those now courted by universities abroad leaving for sure. Acts instituted by an institution headed by cabinet secretary RFK Jr., who claims that ADD, ADHD, Tourette’s, Narcolepsy and Autism was unfamiliar when he was a child. ADD/ADHD was named in 1980, Tourette’s Syndrome was named in 1885, Narcolepsy was named in 1880, Autism was named in 1912…. The same person who believes a new “origins of autism” research study can be completed by September of this year.

Earlier this month, the administration formally rescinded the National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientific integrity policy, which had been created to protect federal scientists from political interference and retaliation. (In a timely fashion, then, note the letter sent by he acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia this week to the editor of a scientific journal, implying that the journal was partisan and asking a series of questions about how the publication protects the public from misinformation, whether it included competing viewpoints and whether it was influenced by funders or advertisers. Suppression of scientific freedom, if you don’t like the results they publish? And do we now need to add crackpot studies that spew misinformation for “fair and balanced” reporting ?)

How many blueberries will there be – taking bets.

Grants terminated (and not just that, but completely, irretrievably deleted from data bases), all references to certain vaccines prohibited. And speaking of vaccines: not only are they no longer officially recommended (causing measles and other avoidable childhood diseases to soar), or are accused of causing autism (long disproven,) they are now actively undermined in their development. Instead of approving the tweaking of existing vaccines for new variants of Covid, for example, just like the CDC did every year for flu vaccines, the pharmacological industry is now asked to run full new trials. Not only would that cost millions of dollars but also would not be possible to do for the next season when shots are most urgently needed, in fall. So the administration can claim there is no “prohibition” of vaccination, but in reality vaccination delayed is health (survival!) denied….

If you neglect research into cancer, infectious and heart diseases, as well as Alzheimers (all of whom have been defunded) how much do you actually care about public health? If you ignore the numbers on Covid infections, maternal deaths, or sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, or prevent treatment of acute drug addiction (Narcan program is canceled), many wonder if they are interested in getting rid of disease, or rather getting rid of sick people.

The magnolia is an ancient tree and on its last leg….

I forgot: food safety inspections – gone. And following $1 billion in food aid cuts by Trump, anti-hunger programs across the U.S. are struggling to feed vulnerable communities, with charities forced to replace nutritious meals with crackers, dried cranberries, and thin soup. The cutting of vital food assistance threatens the health and dignity of millions of low-income Americans.

If you prohibit mask wearing despite the scientifically demonstrate protection they provide against infectious diseases, what is your justification, particularly for vulnerable populations like the elderly and immune-compromised? When is the line crossed to applied eugenics?

The bans limiting exposure to toxic chemicals touch most facets of daily life, prohibiting everything from bisphenol in children’s products to mercury in personal care products to PFAS in food packagingand clothing. The administration is moving to kill the bans on PFAS. The location of thousands of high-risk chemical plant now shielded from public view. Car safety rules? Loosened.

Medicaid? House Republicans are considering slashing the federal government’s 90% funding match for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act — a move that could strip millions of low-income Americans of their health insurance, shifting massive costs onto states, dismantling a pillar of Obamacare.

Frontyard lilac.

Here is a site where you can find most actions taken by the administration regarding our health, sorted by month since the inauguration.

And here is a nifty general tracker that is constantly updated, where you can look at what is changing in many aspects of our daily and legal universe for yourself. In case you aren’t depressed enough yet. Every single claim made above, by the way, can also be found in the news, newspapers, journals and radio and TV programs alike. There is nothing hidden about it. I just don’t have the patience to add all the links.

I do, however, recommend reading a longer piece that made quite a bit of sense to me in explaining where the anti-science attitude originated. Hint, the claim is that it was born from an anti-governmental ideology long anchored in conservative thinking. An interesting analysis from 3 years ago by a Harvard Historian of Science and a NASA historian at CalTech.

However, what we are seeing now is going beyond that. If you undermine public health, disaster response, and climate crisis mitigation, you harm the nation you are supposed to protect. The amassing of power when you dismantle independent agencies and academic scientific research, and surround yourself with sycophants rather than experts who know what they are doing, might be the goal, but it will not lead to an advancement of the common good, the health, safety and perhaps prosperity of all of us. The few who benefit might have the illusion that they can retreat to their private islands, their luxury bunkers or another planet – but reality will catch up even with them, if only after many of us have been harmed by the denial of science and the tools it offers for our survival.

Music today is meant to cheer us all, with one of the most incredible drummers of our time – Yussef Dayes. There is light in that greenhouse – and that music – the would be familiar to Dickinson…..

Rhodies in the park.

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