I still remember my dad getting mad when I’d pick these and blow tiny parachutes all over the yard.
Now that I have to weed the garden myself, I admire them through the camera lens.
It comforts me to know I still haven’t outgrown all my childhood joys.
After finishing “January First� yesterday, I decided it was time to get out of the house and invent the day I wanted it to be.
As I left the house with my camera, I was greeted by this hummingbird and couldn’t pass up a few shots:
I drove four blocks to Pt Defiance beach and took a new look at some sea gulls I hadn’t really looked at for awhile. Strangely, I’d never noticed their colorful beak:
Gazing out into the Sound, I wondered why I was the only one watching this small Horned Grebe repeatedly diving, catching small fish:
On my way back to the car, a spied a seagull carrying a leaf and wondered if it was decorating for Halloween:
Only after it moved closer did I realize the gull was holding a crab in its mouth, and the crab was holding the leaf. Silly me, I should have known that crabs, not seagulls, celebrate Halloween.
I spent a little while wandering around the boathouse, trying to figure out which way the wind was blowing
before leaving the beach and driving another two or three blocks up the hill to the zoo to get some pictures of the Wood Ducks. When I arrived I was told they were hiding in the grass after being terrorized by some wild Mallard drakes.
While waiting for them to return to the pond, I went to see if the Arctic Kit Fox was out. He wasn’t, but there were several dragonflies flying around. Since I’ve been trying to get a picture of one for months, I didn’t really mind when visitors looked at me rather oddly since I seemed fixated on an empty exhibit. My patience paid off as I managed to get this shot:
After taking several photographs of the dragonflies, I went back and got the picture I had really come for:
By then the compact flash card was full, so I had to skip the mushroom and Pileated Woodpecker pictures I had also hoped to get.
How’d you choose to invent your day?
I was disappointed to discover that I liked very few of Bishop’s translations, but perhaps shouldn’t have been considering that I generally don’t like her style of poetry and it seems only natural that she would translate poems in the style she admires.
Nevertheless, I was quite taken with Bishop’s translation of Octavio Paz’s “January First:”
The year’s doors open
like those of language
toward the unknown.
Last night you told me:
tomorow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.
I opened my eyes late
For a second of a second
I felt what the Aztec felt,
on the crest of the promontory,
lying in wait
for time’s uncertain return
through cracks in the horizon.
But no, the year had returned.
It filled all the room
and my look almost touched it.
Time, with no help from us,
had placed
in exactly the same order as yesterday
houses in the empty street,
snow on the houses,
silence on the snow.
You were beside me,
still asleep.
The day had invented you
but you hadn’t yet accepted
being invented by the day.
—Nor possibly my being invented, either.
You were in another day.
You were beside me
and I saw you, like the snow,
asleep among the appearances.
Time, with no help from us,
invents houses, streets, trees,
and sleeping women.
When you open your eyes
we’ll walk, once more,
among the hours and their inventions.
We’ll walk among appearances
and bear witness to time and its conjugations.
Perhaps we’ll open the day’s doors.
And then we shall enter the unknown.
Cambridge, Mass,. 1 January 1975.
I love the perspective on life this poem offers. While not a new perspective it is certainly a perspective we constantly lose in the everyday clutter we call our lives.
It’s all too easy, especially at my age, to forget that each day we enter the “unknown” if we’re willing to look at it freshly.
In that sense, we do invent each day. Perhaps New Year’s Day is the best day to realize this, but it’s also true every day of the year.
As I’ve noted a few times in this blog, one of the reasons I read poetry regularly is precisely because at its best it jolts us into a new awareness, as implied by the opening line, “The year’s doors open/like those of language/toward the unknown.”
At four inches long, he’s probably too small to be king. Surprised they didn’t call him Ruby-Crowned Princelet.