Month: April 2007

At the Shore

Drove to the beach yesterday hoping to catch sight of shorebirds on their annual migration north. But it was the lowest tide I’ve seen in years, and if there were any shore birds we certainly didn’t get close enough to see any, much less to take pictures.

Instead, we were treated to an even stranger phenomena. A bright, sunny day! At Ocean Shores!

I lived in Aberdeen for nearly a year and fled the constant rain that began to depress me despite the fact that I’ve always loved the Pacific Northwest. Still, there’s nothing better than a sunny day at the beach. It seems strangely appropriate that the biggest draw here now is an Indian Casino.

Despite the sunshine, we didn’t see many people in our five-mile walk, and even those we saw were distant, intent on enjoying their short time on this timeless beach.

I haven’t visited here in nearly a year, and large parts of the beach that used to be covered in grass were now covered by sand. The old road leading out to the point was so covered with sand that the bulldozer driver seemed to be having a hard time rediscovering it.

Strangely comforting
these infinite grains of sand —
once giant boulders.

Skagit Tulip Fields

Bob and I waited all week for a sunny day to drive up to the tulip farms in the Skagit Valley. And for once it was actually as sunny as the forecasters had predicted. I’d never visited the fields, so I was a amazed by the number of people who were out on a weekday visiting tulip fields.

I’ll have to admit that photographically I was a little overwhelmed by the fields, just as I’ve been in the past when I’ve tried to find an original way of presenting my impression of fields full of flowers.

I suppose I could have taken one of my granddaughters with me and posed her smelling the tulips, but somehow that seems more clichéd than I’d care to do.
Instead, I’m left trying to make abstracts of the fields, an image that can somehow manage to capture the sheer number of flowers but also convey some sense of order, other than the very neat, mechanical rows, of course.

I’m afraid my rather mathematical mind couldn’t go much beyond variations on perspective, like this one with the vanishing point in the upper left corner:

Or this more traditional vanishing point, which leaves one wondering why it took so long historically for artists to actually incorporate perspective in their drawings:

In the end though, I really enjoyed the small plantings of various tulips at Tulip Town more than rows on rows of tulip plants, perhaps because it reminds me of the “naturalized” effect. Of course, the fact that these were called “Kees Uncle” also seemed to call to me for some reason:

I certainly saw a lot of unusual tulips, and though I’d like to have a few of them in my yard, like this one called Washington State,

overall I think I’m happier trying to get shots of the tulips in my own yard. Here, at least, I can do a better job of isolating a single plant, and, if the lighting isn’t what I want one day, I can wait awhile and re-shoot the flower later.

Kees’ “The Musician’s Wife”

Although the most famous of Kees’ poems, the “Robinson poems,” and, in particular Aspects-of-Robinson/ first reminded me of Eliot’s “J. Alfred Prufrock,” the more I read them the more they reminded me of E.A. Robinson’s “Richard Cory.” So much so, that it made me wonder if Kees didn’t use that title as an allusion to Robinson because both poets suffered critical neglect most of their lives and both seemed to realize the price they were paying in order to write poetry.

Although Kees’ Robinson never commits suicide, the thought of suicide hangs over all the poems, just as some critics have suggested that the poems presage Kees’ own suicide. I think I would admire Kees’ poems more, however, if I hadn’t read Richard Cory long before I read his poems.

While I liked most of the Robinson poems, my favorite Kees’ poem would have to be the much less anthologized:

A MUSICIAN’S WIFE

Between the visits to the shock ward
The doctors used to let you play
On the old upright Baldwin
Donated by a former patient
Who is said to be quite stable now.

And all day long you played Chopin,
Badly and hauntingly, when you weren’t
Screaming on the porch that looked
Like an enormous birdcage. Or sat
In your room and stared out at the sky.

You never looked at me at all.
I used to walk down to where the bus stopped
Over the hill where the eucalyptus trees
Moved in the fog, and stared down
At the lights coming on, in the white rooms.

And always, when I came back to my sister’s
I used to get out the records you made
The year before all your terrible trouble,
The records the critics praised and nobody bought
That are almost worn out now.

Now, sometimes I wake in the night
And hear the sound of dead leaves
against the shutters. And then a distant
Music starts, a music out of an abyss,
And it is dawn before I sleep again.

While my appreciation of this “Uncollected Poem” may be colored by having read that, “His wife became seriously alcoholic and then mentally ill” previously, it seems to me that it would be particularly moving to anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of knowing someone who has been committed to an institution.

Unfortunately it also reminds me of my mother when she had to be placed in a nursing home because of her advanced Alzheimer’s disease. It was especially heartbreaking at moments when she seemed to be her old self and wanted “to go home,” though “home” was where she lived until she was 18.

For an artist, though, the most moving line might well be “The records the critics praised and nobody bought.”

Back to Weyerhaeyser Rhododendron and Bonsai Garden

I’m beginning to think that the unsettled weather we’ve been having this year is caused by my friend bob, a visiting photographer from Massachusetts who’s been complaining about the lack of sunshine and how that’s making good photographs hard to come by. As if to prove his point, we headed out for the Weyerhaeuser Rhododendron and Bonsai Garden in full sunshine, but by the time we got there, a mere 30 minutes away, the clouds had completely blocked the sun.

But who needs sunshine when you’ve got a brilliant yellow Rhodie, which seemed to provide its own sunshine

an unusual Rhodie like this

and a delicate pink Schlippenbachii found from Korea to China.

As I told Bob, when you have waves of color like this you really don’t need much sunshine to get beautiful pictures.