No one wears high heels with as much panache as the Russian women do, skipping across the old cobblestones as if they were barefoot. It never failed to amaze me as I trudged along in my sneakers, feeling decidedly unstylish in comparison.
The gold-and-white ballroom of the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. In the morning the light falls in stripes across the elaborate parquet floors. All the palace museums make you wear slippers over your shoes, which makes sliding around the marble or parquet floors a LOT of fun.
Behind me is the apartment house in St. Petersburg where Anna Akhmatova lived for many years; it is now a museum. When she was under house arrest she had to come to the window every morning to show her face to the guard sitting on that bench. This was to prove that she hadn’t committed suicide in the night.
We had breakfast at Sitka & Spruce this morning. The light streams in through high ceilings, glancing off the worn chairs, the dark wood table, gathering itself in the clear facets of the drinking glasses. I love the texture of the concrete walls, which don’t so much absorb sound as bounce our voices around. It can get quite loud here, later on. It was good to catch up with my friends.
The sky over Puget Sound - the view from the Olympic Sculpture Park. We went for a walk one evening after dinner. Now summer is finally here, the sky is still light until quite late - 9pm or so.
Every year I wait impatiently for the arrival of peonies. I love their fluffy blossoms and sweet fragrance, and I buy them week after week, until they’re gone.
for whit.
version 3.0
I dreamed of spring
and lilacs stolen from gardens
as the memory of their fragrance
slips me back in time
to that faraway summer
in St. Petersburg,
city of palaces strung along
necklaces of boulevards,
floating at the edge of the sea
so far north the horizon seems to stop, there;
you are at the end of the world.
Old women in kerchiefs
sold bunches of lilacs
and lilies-of-the-valley
outside metro stations,
their scent trailing
down the escalators
into the subterranean palaces of the metro
guiding you back up to sunlight
like Persephone returning
to spring and earth.
Clearly, someone who lives in my neighborhood is a Charles Bukowski fan.
I was sitting on the floor, waiting. R. left his mother’s supporting hands and walked towards me. You have to be on the floor, at their eye level, to photograph children. You’ll see most of my photographs of children, babies, really, are taken from this angle. When you’re down there with them they will come to trust you.
a poem for a friend
I found this scrap of paper as I was cleaning up my room last night, floating to the surface of the tide of flotsam and jetsam that fills that bedroom. It must have been tucked into a letter from my friend Ana, written when we were young. “A Wednesday Poem,” it says. A handwritten note on the back suggests that we have ‘Wednesday poems’ every week, but somehow I think this tradition never took hold. It seemed serendipitously appropriate to find this at the end of a week of grieving for a friend, who died last Monday. The letter I had been writing the Sunday before is in my bag, unfinished. I wrote another letter to her daughter, instead, late that Monday night, still reeling from the news.
Day brings what it is going to be. Trees -
wherever they are - begin to stand.
I have a crossing to do today
onward through this shadowy land.
How still the earth stayed that night at first
when you didn’t breath. I couldn’t believe
how carefully moonlight came. It was
like the time by my mother’s grave.
Today I am going on. In former times
when you were back there, then
I tried to hold the moon and sun.
Now when they ask me who you were -
I remember, but remember my promise
And I say, “No one.”
Letting You Go.
(William Stafford).
My friend loved poetry; when her children were young she put poems in their lunchboxes every day in April, which is National Poetry Month. In return, they started a blog of poems for her at the beginning of this month, the three now grown children choosing a different poem each day. She died before April came to an end. This friend loved many poets, but her favorite poem was another one by William Stafford, posted here.
