Into The land Of Carmel

I'm knackered. My right shoulder aches, right in the middle. Not as bad as tooth ache, but persistent and annoying just the same. I once described this in great detail to an ortho, and was told the pain was most likely due to holding back a punch. I've always rather liked that (wholly facetious) explanation. That's how work's been these last few months, knackering and driving me to silent, well-contained fury; hence the shoulder pain. Still, it pays the bills and since Christmas I've turned in some amazing work.

And rather surprisingly, my garden hasn't had to endure months of neglect. Instead I've written one huge list, then gone at it like a mad thing in short, hour-long bursts a couple of times each week. The potatoes were planted in one early evening 45-minute blast (staff induction then pointless back to back meetings then a two-hour crawl along the M1 car park). All the bean supports went up in another 40-minutes (interviewing for colleagues and realising no-one was appointable after seeing 9 illiterates one of whom actually submitted their band 8 presentation entirely in text-speak.) That day almost ended with no shoulder pain... Even the onions sets, shallots and all the roots are in.

Part of me worries about this. Like Tita, will all this rage find an explosive outlet in the vegetables I've sown? Hope so. Imagine the rabbit that eats my French beans. This could be the year of a reasonable crop.

At the end of May I took off for the flat lands of Norfolk and some peace and quiet with the vegetarian sisters. An onion tart, a simple dish of perfectly cooked green beans and some fruit were set out for my arrival, and together with a bottle of Isla Negra High Tide and thoughts of my favourite poet I started a few days break from the world. I'm planning a return visit in the autumn, for who can resist the allure of a journey into the land of Carmel to enjoy its fruits and blessings?

The Captain's Verses : A Soldier's Love Letter From The Desert

You will come with me,

in that hour I wait for you,

in that hour and in every hour,

in every hour I wait for you.

And when the sadness that I hate

comes knocking at your door,

tell it that I am waiting for you

and when loneliness wants you to change

the ring in which my name is written,

then tell loneliness to talk to me,

tell it that I had to march

because I am a soldier,

and that there where I am,

under rain or

underfire,

my love, I am waiting for you,

I wait for you in the harshest desert

and by the flowering lemon tree,

in every land where life exists,

where spring is born,

my love, I wait for you.

If they say to you: "That man

does not love you," remember

that my feet are alone in this night, and they

search for the sweet, tiny feet I adore...

...and your soul which I awoke

so that it should keep on singing

until the end of life...

My love, I am waiting for you.

Farewell, my love, I am waiting for you.

My love, my love, I am waiting for you...

And so this letter ends

without any sadness;

my feet are firm on the ground,

my hand writes this letter on my travels

and in the middle of life I shall be

always

next to my friend, facing the enemy,

with your name on my lips

and a kiss that never

went away from yours.

Pablo Neruda: The Captain's Verses

But I Only Love Your Feet

...I love your boots
because they have wandered
over the earth and through
the wind and over the water,
until they brought you to me.

Alstroemeria In Easter Flowers

Yes, I knew that your hands were

a budding sprout, a lily of silver:

you had something to do with the soil,

with the flowering of the earth,

but when I saw you digging, digging,

pushing pebbles apart and guiding roots

I knew at once, my farming woman,

that not only your hands

but your heart were of earth,

that there you were making your things,

touching moist doorways through which the seeds circulate.

So in this way from one plant

to the other recently planted one,

with your face spotted with a kiss from the clay,

you went and came back flowering,

you went and from your hand

the stem of the alstroemeria raised its solitary elegance,

the jasmine adorned the

mist on your brow with stars of dew and fragrance.

Everything grew from you

penetrating into the earth and becoming green light,

foliage and power you communicated your seeds to it,

my beloved,

red gardening woman:

your hand on familiar terms with the earth

and the bright growing was instantaneous.

Love, thus also your hand of water,

your heart of earth,

gave fertility and strength to my songs

you touch my chest while I sleep

and trees blossom from my dreaming.

I wake up, open my eyes,

and you have inside me stars in the shadows

which will rise and shine in my song.

That's how it is, gardening woman:

our love is earthly:

your mouth is a plant of light,

a corolla,

my heart works among the roots.

Homesick

First three horticultural commissions of the year completed; mid-semester exams sat and passed; final parents' evening of my parental career; Gardasil sorted; Lent well under way; and the closer we move towards the Triduum, the heavier my heart becomes, filling with longing for the Holy Land and my home and my past and my future and everything in between. My kitchen turns eastwards and closer to my homeland as rice replaces tubers, and harissa enters centre stage, with cumin, saffron and green leafy coriander to rock my world. I hanker silently for rice and chestnuts and lamb, for kibbeh, for falafel crammed inside flatbreads, for musakan and always for mansaf. Homesickness always strikes hardest during Lent; longing and loneliness born with silence and courage and shreds of hope. I love what I do not have. You are so far.

But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.

The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.

And as I love you, the pines in the wind

want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

The Transmigration of Dream Into Salad

My heart, queen of the beehive and the barnyard,
little leopard of the string and the onions,
I love to watch your miniature empire
sparkle: your weapons of wax and wine and oil, garlic, and the soil that opens for your hands,
the blue material that ignites in your hands,
the transmigration of dream into salad,
the snake rolled up in the garden hose.
You with your sickle that lifts the perfumes,
you with the bossy soapsuds,
you climbing my crazy ladders and stairs.
You taking charge: even my handwriting, its characteristics,
even the grains of sand in my notebooks - finding in those pages
lost syllables that were searching for your mouth.
Sonnet XXXVI

Oh Earth, Wait For Me

Turn me oh sun
towards my native destiny,
rain from the ancient forest,
return to me the fragrance and the swords
that fall from the sky,
the solitary peace of field and rock,
the moisture at the margins of the river,
the scent of the larch,
the wind, alive like a heart
beating among the remote flock
of the great araucaria.

Earth, return to me your pure gifts
the towers of silence that rose
from the solemnity of their roots:
I want to return to being what I have not been,
learn to return from such depths
that amongst all the things of nature
I could live or not live: no matter
to be one more stone, the dark stone,
the pure stone that is carried by the river.

Pablo Neruda from: ‘Memorial de Isla Negra’

Sonnet LIII

Here are the bread--the wine--the table--the house:
a man's needs, and a woman's, and a life's.
Peace whirled through and settled in this place:
the common fire burned, to make this light.

Hail to your two hands, which fly and make
their white creations, the singing and the food:
salve! the wholesomeness of your busy feet;
viva! the ballerina who dances with the broom.

Those rugged rivers of water and of threat,
tortuous pavilions of the foam,
incendiary hives and reefs: today

they are this respite, your blood in mine,
this path, starry and blue as the night,
this never-ending simple tenderness.

Rosa "Constance Spry," which introduced the myrrh fragrance to the breeding of the English Roses, growing around an oil jar in the late afternoon sunshine.

On a Weekend of Sunshine and Blustery Westerly Winds

I stripped all the bed linens this morning and laundered them in my favourite oceanic Bold for no other reason than the weatherman forecast a weekend of sunshine and blustery winds. By 7am the washing lines were hung with white sheets and pillow cases, blowing nearly horizontal in the westerly winds, billowing and cracking as they filled with air.

There are few things more lovely than sleeping in a bed of wind dried bedlinen. I remember a similar weekend last summer, and waking to the sounds of the white cotton curtains moving and rustling as they blew against the open windows. Every so often they were caught by the cool draughts and billowed up to the ceiling, letting in the bright white light of early summer mornings. I thought for a moment that I had woken up on the deck of a sailing ship on the high seas.

And watching my laundry, I thought of Pablo Neruda's love for Mathilde Urrutia, for Chile, for the ocean, offered to us through his 100 Love Sonnets. And this;

Love, love, the clouds went up the tower of the sky

like triumphant washer women, and it all

glowed in blue, all like a single star,

the sea, the ship, the day were all exiled together.

... There's nothing here but light, quantities, clusters,

space opened by the graces of the wind

till it gives up the final secret of the foam.

Among so many blues - heavenly blues, sunken blues-

our eyes are a little confused: they can hardly divine

the powers of the air, the keys to the secrets in the sea.

Twenty Love Poems XVIII and a Song of Despair

Here I love you
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.

Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.
Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.
The moon turns its clockwork dream.

The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

From Pablo to Triniti

Out of lemon flowers loosed on the moonlight,
love's lashed and insatiable essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow emerges,
the lemons move down from the tree's planetarium
Delicate merchandise!
The harbours are big with it-bazaars for the light and the barbarous gold.
We open the halves of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids brims into the starry divisions :
creation's original juices, irreducible, changeless, alive:
so the freshness lives on in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.
Cutting the lemon the knife leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye that open acidulous glass to the light;
topazes riding the droplets,
altars, aromatic facades.
So, while the hand holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world on a trencher,
the gold of the universe wells to your touch:
a cup yellow with miracles,
a breast and a nipple perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.



The water’s wide, I can’t get over,
And nor do I have wings to fly,
Give me a boat that will carry two,
And both shall row, my love and I.
There is a ship that sails the sea,
She’s loaded deep, as deep can be,
But not so deep as the love I’m in,
I’ll know not if I sink or swim.