my own private rubaiyat

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

This could have been a day like others. A Spring morning, a small journey ahead,

some chores to do beforehand. Dogs to water and run, clean up the yard, empty the dishwasher. I took the day off, a floating holiday.

The adjective is pleasing. It’s been a long, long time since I floated.

And not a drop that from our Cups we throw On the parcht herbage, but may steal below   To quench the fire of Anguish in some Eye There hidden-far beneath, and long ago.

As then the Tulip for her wonted sup Of Heavenly Vintage lifts her chalice up,   Do you, twin offspring of the soil, till Heav’n To Earth invert you like an empty Cup

Two years ago today, a Friday night, an earlier Spring, I served a final meal to my dying sister, who passed away seven days later. I have to tell you now (and I’m not sure why this applies, but humor me), I won’t cook liver and onions again. Didn’t like it then, hate them even more now. I guess it was an act of sisterly love and my meager attempt to fulfill a phantom hunger of a soul who could no longer taste. But she did savor a small portion of the food she’d craved, and on that last Friday night in 2007, it was enough. There are moments when small portions are simply quite enough.

Do you, within your little hour of Grace, The waving Cypress in your Arms enlace,   Before the Mother back into her arms       Fold, and dissolve you in a last embrace.

Yesterday I left town and traveled to the tulip fields outside Mt. Vernon with my niece, my late sister’s only daughter. We caught the early afternoon, just past noon, just past midday I-405 to I-5 slide northbound from Seattle, blending gradually in line with other travelers going other places, surely thinking other things, worrying of other needs, other people, unknown worlds, north on Monday.

And if the Cup you drink, the Lip you press, End in what All begins and ends in – Yes;   Imagine then you are what heretofore You were – hereafter you shall not be less.

Erin, pregnant with her first child at 39, is near the waddling stage. I, at 50, tread slowly with a lingering illness from winter; I shake off the mental inertia and realize that I haven’t seen the flat and often flooded lowlands of the Skagit Valley fields in years. Purpley-green vistas, snowcaps on the foothill rises around Mt. Baker and Stevens Pass, fields upon fields of petals spread, perched on blue-green viscous, velvety stalks above damp gray dirt, chalky clods of greyed basalt mud in the heat of the warmest day in this year still too full of cold.

How many feet ran with sunlight, water, and air? What little devils shaken of laughter, cramming their little ribs with chuckles, Fixed this lone red tulip, a woman’s mouth of passion kisses, a nun’s mouth of sweet thinking, here topping a straight line of green, a pillar stem? Who hurled this bomb of red caresses?

In the darkness of cold winter, rain-soaked days, doom in the news, disappointment that has draped an impatient and hurting world, it’s easy to forget the Spring.

Easy to forget the bulbs that lay in the ground, silent, until the right season, until the sun calls loudly from the sky.  There is brilliance ahead in the road, in the field.

The Cypress to the Tulip spake: “What bliss         Seest thou in sunshine, dancing still like this?” “My cup,” the Tulip said, “the wind’s lips kiss;   Dancing I hear the Song without a sound.” (III)

Colors forgotten still exist.

There is no far nor near Within the spirit’s sphere. The summer sunset’s scarlet-yellow wings Are tinged with the same dye That paints the tulip’s ply.   And what is colour but the soul of things? (IV)

This could have been a day like others, but it wasn’t.

Poetry citations in sequence:

I. Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat – XLII to XLV; trans. Edward Fitzgerald, ed. (1809-1883)

II. Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers – Garden Wireless (1918)

III. Sir Edwin Arnold – With Sa’di in the Garden, Song without a Sound (1895)

IV. Bliss Carmen – On Love (1917)

(Crossposted at Dailykos)