Oona Beatrix Haggerty. Born August 24th 2009.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:/Its loveliness increases; it will never/ Pass into nothingness; but still will keep/ A bower quiet for us, and a sleep/ Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing… John Keats. It was difficult to find a poetic response to the exquisite moment of meeting my Granddaughter.  A couple of months ago I began to re-read my own mother’s leather copy of The Poems of John Keats. On his tombstone was written [with no name at his own request]: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.  The feeling of great joy and great sorrow can melt one completely, dissolving who we take ourselves to be into the same ocean.

Monday night, just after several of us stood in line for, then tasted the best ice cream in Berkeley, Oona Beatrix Haggerty was born in a hospital just a few blocks from the ice cream store. It seems just after I wrote the last posting about waiting for the baby, Laura went into labor – a long labor, but one mercifully, without complications.

Last night I held her and fell into the eternity the new ones carry to us for awhile. Then I felt the hoop of continual life and death, and my new place along it’s curve. I spoke on the phone to Great-Grandmother Gloria, age 87, and felt her up ahead of me. Shabda sang an evening Raga to Oona and she slept.  I kissed my  courageous daughter-in-law and  hugged my son close, savoring our new roles – Grandmother, father, child.

Sweet and low, sweet and low,/Wind of the Western Sea!…/Over the rolling waters go/…While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps.. Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Everything is going to change next week or the week after.  I have no doubt that is true. For the Sufi there is a kind of elevator that you are in and every now and then it changes floors unexpectedly. Once I was at a sacred place on the white-washed hillside above  Fez, Morocco, bathing in the atmosphere of a saint from centuries ago, when all-at-once I felt as though a large energy filled me and wished me to reach out and touch and empower my fellow travelers. When I felt like myself again, I was different, but my knowing Sufi guide and companion whispered to me, don’t think about it, just let it go. Wise words, because the western mind is always trying to understand stuff, bring experience into something we can examine. There is the human mystery known as labor and birth.. Afterwards, it’s like trying to fit into your 10-year-old shoes when you are 20. Time has marked you. You are on another floor and the elevator door is open and you walk out with your mind blank, changed from the woman who stepped into that “lift,” as they call an elevator in England. A painting can do that. Vermeer’s The Geographer, shows a man, bent over a book and a chart holding a compass. He’s lost in some geographical place or calculation, perhaps inside the flat world with the vanishing edge where boats disappeared… and that mood matches a cool filtered light which enters the painting through the lattice of clear window glass, then falls on the floor and the globe behind him. Great art can put you there, if you are lucky. Step out of the museum washed in that light.

Vermeer, The Geographer

When my son, Ammon, and his beautiful wife Laura become parents for the first time  – very soon–I will enter new light. So they say. In the mean time I am suspended like the geographer; I’m not exactly in the room with the compass and globe, and not quite at some imagined location in his vision. My life will change as when the elevator door opens. I will be a grandmother. My arms will hold a baby and my house will become a grandparent’s house. This is all a normal thing, they tell me; gates across the stairs, child-proof locks, weight training for lifting.  I’m impatient. What will the eyesof my granddaughter see when she looks at me? What will I see in her face? Like all great mysteries, this unseen land will be charted and I will set foot there. There will be a name. And celebration. Oh, yes!

   

Tiger Lillies...

Touch a silky floral creature and you risk being pricked, bitten, pecked, growled at, or licked. Imagine this tiny, furry or reptilian beast tugging flower petals around itself, trying on greenery, snapping at the others, or roaring fragrantly like the Tiger Lily does when provoked. Which of these deserves to spring from the patrician rose stem, with its history of bloody elegance? The Mousecup doesn’t. Expect tears from those whose leaves dry out before the blossom, and some bud will likely embarrass itself by popping out from a weedy nettle stalk.

a rare sighting of the Roosterbag

Staghorn, Frogwart! What hostess will let you bring that arrangement inside? There’s always the danger that the animal might overpowers the flower. Let’s say a dragonwing grows a second wing, a body, large jaws, and yanks out the roots to make a tail.

Dandylion

Call the Dandylion. (Mention diversity.) Plant the giant, mythically strange Roosterbag in your yard. Plant two or three! Many avoid the lovely, flowering Dogwood tree that barks at anyone pushing a stroller, while Dogtooth Violets just whine and snap at your legs. Foxgloves usually flower cleanly,without incident.

foxglove

 The Cock’scomb is often grafitti’d by adolescent boys, while the Cat’s Claw bush outside a party can catch and tear a girl’s dress.

 For rank geezerhood, try the Goat’s Beard, yellowing like aging teeth. In those tabloid moments, observe the Lambs Ear and Pussywillow in strapless evening gowns and stiletto heels, made up lambs and kitties as small as your thumb, each decorated with red, white and pink petals, and smelling like cherry chapstick.

I’m in a cabin, somewhere down off 23 South, in North West Arkansas, no phone, wifi or interference from the outer world. Tall forest everywhere! To touch in with the outside world or announce The Sound Journal (the brand new on-line version Kyra and I put together  thesoundjournal.org), I drive a few miles to the Carnegie library in the nearest town, Eureka Springs. California is as a dizzy flight or two away, like Oz was from Kansas. I know I’m a city girl when this place seems way more exotic than Marrakech, Morocco. How about this Palace Hotel sign on the old 1901 brothel?

 And take those two upside-down armadillos we drove past this morning – well, drove past one, then spun around to take his or her photo, there in the right lane. Wendy TC, my gracious host, was telling me what they do to gardens when they are among the living. There is a frantic kind of digging for what they need, insects and worms – like when you can’t find your keys or glasses and you might miss a flight if you don’t go right now. An armadillo can be described as a cross between a big-tailed vole and a raccoon wearing a tortoise shell back-pack.

 We went to a barn party a couple of nights ago, thrown by a giant puppeteer – the puppets are giant, the man, George, is just tall. His enormous puppets are mounted on the walls; gravel covers the floor. We were celebrating Barbara’s birthday. Most were wearing tie-dye and the food was good. I never met Barbara, but joined in the large circle, singing happy birthday. I liked the outhouse there. The sound system opened with Jimmy Hendricks’ Purple Haze. We were of the age where some of us had actually heard Jimmy Hendricks play, like at Winterland in 1968.

But the real reason I am here is to write poetry with uninterrupted happiness for hours. I’ve got a small kitchen, AC, and my best writer friend, Wendy TC is in the next cabin. I’ll be going to the library to post this. Now, back to my last version of my new poem, “Just Who Do You Think You Are?”  Where was I?

one of the many chicken trucks on the highway...

Ready for a few words from Walt….

at the barn party...

“I have perceiv’d that to be with those that I like is enough,/ To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,/ To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, laughing flesh is enough,/ To pass among them, or touch anyone, or rest my arm ever so lightly around his neck or her neck for a moment – what is this then?/ I do not ask any more delight – I swim in it as in a sea….”

Walt Whitman, excerpt, I Sing The Body Electric 4.

As magical as Morocco seemed in the last two posts, it is beginning to feel like those home movies you get your friends to watch when they come over, and some of your good friends have seen them before….  So it’s time to go from the “royals” to the frogs. 

I bet you didn’t know about the Frog Walls in East Germany near Berlin. This cannot be common knowledge. The Germans seem so level headed and practical. Their country is a grown-up place, compared to adolescent america.  Nothing prepared me for those 10″ walls along the road on the edge of the forest. Not the 10′ walls that divided Berlin – No. These are the famous walls to keep the local frogs from jumping in front of cars, or crossing the road at a bad time; or simply hanging out on that smooth black surface. I made R.R.Rahima stop the car so I could take a picture at tire level.  So now the question of motivation arises. Is it a kind of clean-freak thing — no squished frogs, flattened outlines to disturb motorists? Or is it animal (reptile) protection, environmental carefulness? Was there a swarm of frogs in this area, Communist frogs that have been hiding in the woods for a few decades? Or did an eccentric naturalist just come up with this idea and make it into a crusade? “Save the frogs along here!” (I missed taking a photo of the caution sign with a red exclamation mark and a frog.)

I googled to see what they have with “Germany” and “Frog Wall” and I found Frog Pond Life Prepasted Wall Boarder, in stock for

$8.99.

So where am I going with this? I’m not about to kiss a frog wall to see if it turns into a castle with a prince but I can show Lady GaGa who appeared on German Television last week wearing a green coat made up of dozens of Kermit-the-frogs. Here she is! it makes me wonder about those frog walls… Did Lady GaGa see the frog walls and become inspired with reptilian fashion possibilities? Or is she merely trolling for her own hoped-for Royal Moment?

May all frogs be well and happy.