Hunting the Boar

My new collection of poems, Hunting the Boar, has been published and is ready to order from CB editions.

I've been writing some of these poems for the last four years, others are older, and many of them are situated in the south of France, where my husband's family has had a home for several generations--one great great grandfather was from the village, in the hills near the Mont Ventoux, and though he worked most of his life elsewhere, he returned to the village to retire, converting an old plaster factory /silkworm farm into a home.

The book's title "Hunting the Boar" is about one of our neighbours who, like other village farmers, loves hunting. Our favourite way of spending New Year's Eve is to go down to his house and have a drink with him around his kitchen table, with the mistral blowing outside.

Yesterday

We went to San Francisco yesterday to have dinner with friends. On the way we stopped to visit the Bonnard exhibit at the Legion d'Honneur. When we came out we had an hour to spend, so we lounged on the lawn out front with a view of the entrance to the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, and closer to us, a bronze statue of a nobleman (El Cid) on a horse leading his troops (presumably, no sign of them) into battle; we watched a series of bridal parties arrange themselves for photographs against the colonnade, and tables, chairs, fake flowers, speakers, musical instruments and a chef being unloaded from shiny white and chromium trucks for an event in the museum. The sky was blue, sailboats tacked under the bridge, the headlands glittered with cars, there was only the slightest hint of fog, though the fog horns were already blowing. We drove downtown past a playground where I used to take my kids to play. I felt no nostalgia.

The Train Whistle

I think there's a freight train in the middle of the night. I think I have read that somewhere, maybe in the local weekly, in one of the stories about the high school kids. Because sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night and I hear the train whistle, I think it's too early for the commuter runs to have begun.

The commuter runs begin at 5 am, I think, so if I'm awake and I hear the train, but the sky is still dark, it may, I think, be 5 am, and I can go back to sleep for an hour or two. At breakfast time they come closer together. They whistle because there is a series of level crossings, a couple in each suburban town along the tracks, north to San Francisco or south to St Jose. Then they are more spaced out during the day, then around dinner time, it's almost constant train whistle for an hour or two. They whistle to warn they are there, to try and keep cars off the tracks at the level crossings, which is not always possible, even if the barriers come down, which they always do. There are also warning signs: do not stop on the tracks! But I imagine that in rush hour, when the cars are bumper to bumper heading for the highways north and south out of Silicon Valley, and the drivers are inching along, maybe reading their phones, one might get stuck. 

There is a bike path along the tracks behind the health center, the shopping center, the high school. I ride on it a couple of times a day and sometimes the trains rushes past. It is a huge dinosaur of a train, like a train from another epoch, almost science fictional, compared with the sleek trains in Europe or, I imagine, Japan.

The whistles remind me of train stations in Canada, where one got on board in Vancouver and got off one day later in the Rockies (Jasper, Banff) two days later in Saskatoon, three days later in Toronto or Montreal, having seen lots of mountains, wheat, grain elevators, but not many houses or cities or people.  Sometimes a cow got on the tracks.  Once, when I was about twenty and travelling by myself to Quebec City for a French immersion summer school, a white-haired man took an interest in me and tried to kiss me on the train. A train trip was never something you did for an hour or two as in France or England. So, still, when I hear the train whistle, I think of going on long trips. The man had very pink skin and very fine white hair, as I recall.

Tea and Cookies

Met up with a friend from our old neighbourhood yesterday...we were going to go to a cafe and sit outside and eat ice cream, but the weather was cold and grey, so she made us tea and cookies at her place instead, and we exchanged news and thoughts, about pretty much everything. She is working on an essay about the Cretan Paradox, but won't show even a page of it, until she likes it better. We talked about deconstructed literature, and she--she's a mathematician by formation--plumped for arguments in the traditional fashion, with a beginning, a middle and an end. The time passed quickly. I tried to keep track of her stories--she and her husband, who died a couple of years ago, have known a dizzying number of figures of American and French intellectual and creative life over the past 70 years and have stories about them all--Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell at Yaddo, or so-and-so in Paris in such and such a cafe or gathering.

Today the sun is shining, the washing machine is humming in the background, and I have my seminar for 3 hours this afternoon, then the gym, and it's biking weather again.

The Contemporary

I'm sitting in on a seminar called "The Contemporary,' with students from different departments, German and Complit but also Education and Anthropology. The problem is partly to define what 'contemporary' means: e.g, a moving target...not an epoch but an ethos... . The professor, Amir Eshel, is a German/Complit person and for the first session we read Coetzee and Celan. Last week I was away, and missed a discussion that included a New Yorker article on catching Bin Laden and the film 'Zero Dark Thirty,' which I tried to watch anyway, but couldn't get past the initial torture scenes. History was the theme. This week Paul Rabinow is coming over from Berkeley and the readings are from his books. One especially interests me--about a German writer, Alexander Kluge, who has collaborated on books with Gerhard Richter. The reading is from an article--an assemblage of 'posts' by Rabinow on an assemblage of posts by Kluge, interspersed with Richter photographs of snowy woods: December. I'm going to have buy the book, which Seagull has brought out, because I'm trying to figure out where to go with my own thoughts and Kluge's texts--what I've seen so far--fascinate me.

Here, I've just found this online, for anyone who might be interested. I suspect my own interest is partly literary, partly the snow (Robert Frost's 'Whose Woods These Are" was my formative poetry experience and my dad's favourite poem), partly World War 2, which is also an obsession of Kluge who was 10 at the time.)

And something about how landscape, not people/characters, is the agent.

Yesterday I worked at the farm, weeding celeriac and garlic. My reward was two leeks, some flowers and strawberries.

Microclimates

Just back from three days in Utah and winter's end: patches of snow melting into rivulets flowing into streams and ponds, rushing over beaver dams in need of rebuilding. Out hiking yesterday morning I stepped onto what looked like hard snow and my leg plunged down a foot or two--I was walking on a log over a gully. The dogs ran out on the ice of the beaver ponds, barking at ducks swimming in a melted bit of the pond, and both of them went right through the ice and had trouble getting back up onto solid ice. Elk meandered through empty fields between houses and horses. The sagebrush looks bedraggled, the high cold desert bare and grey-brown, with just the odd small yellow wildflower popping up.

We left the coast in the middle of a heat wave and have returned to rain. But it's still bare feet weather.

Zumba

Tuesday and Thursday, late afternoon, I go to a Zumba class. It takes place on one of the gym's three basketball courts, glassed-in, but I think soundproof, since the folks passing by look in, perhaps surprised by all the jumping bodies, but I have the feeling they can't hear the music which is, well, loud and latin. 

We're a mixed bag of participants. Last quarter there were a couple of game men, but this term we're all women, backgrounds Latina, African-American, a large Asian contingent and the Caucasians. In general the Latin-Americans are really good at the Twerk, the rest of us, it depends, partly on age, ethnic background, possibly also marital status...  And the instructor, male, Latino, is amazing: he can move every part of his body separately, starting, say, at the shoulders and working down. It's fluid, it's like waves moving down his body. Me, I just try to get the footwork and occasionally, if I can, add in some arms. A woman who's new this term, from Guatamala, who is an interpreter at the Children's Hospital, says I should come with her to another zumba class, where the instructor pays a lot more attention to detail which, she says, is good for the form of it, but perhaps less aerobic. "Do you like dancing?" she asks. "Oh yes," I say, "but I'm no good." I don't add that once I could do a mean Twist.

I could editorialize: about how the Latinas are so much better at this than most of the rest of us. There's one younger woman from Latin America somewhere, originally, who hardly seems to move at all, but still manages to be incredibly sexy, from her Nikes to the aloofness of her head in a turn. It's definitely not a Anglo thing (nor, based on the evidence of a few participants in one class, Chinese) and it makes me really envious. I Imagine households where everyone is dancing all the time, noisy, joyful--and then I remember how I like quiet corners, stillness and books.

Gardening/'Farming'

 I stood for a couple of hours at a high shaded table, pricking out tomato seedlings from tiny containers into slightly bigger ones. The seedlings--half a dozen different varieties, for cooking and eating, red, yellow--are a healthy size, and it felt good easing them out of one container into another, centering them, sifting potting mixture around them, tucking them in, labelling them, moving trays of them into another plastic-wrapped greenhouse till they are the right size to slip into the ground. 

When all the tomatoes had been done, we--me and a bunch of student volunteers putting in their required time at the 'farm' for a class in earth sciences--switched to peppers, frailer subjects, mostly just a tiny leaf or two trailing roots, but same process. 

The thing about tomatoes is the smell of the leaves. I squeeze them and then I sniff my fingers, revelling in it. It's as good as the tomatoes themselves, though tomatoes off the vine are pretty terrific too.

My reward for my labour is two fat leeks, a visit to the chickens that netted three fresh eggs, a bag of strawberries, some fresh oregano, and a bouquet of orange and yellow flowers that look like marigolds but aren't. Their petals are edible. Dinner: leeks (I wrote leaks) with olive oil, an omelet, strawberries.