Poem of the Week 2015/28

On first looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
   And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
   Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
   That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
   Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
   When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
   He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
   Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats

Last week's poem on reading Dryden's Virgil brought to mind Keats's famous sonnet on his first reading of Chapman's Homer.

The Chapman referred to is the English Renaissance poet and dramatist George Chapman (1559 - 1634), whose translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, published in 1616 as The Whole Works of Homer, were the first complete versions in English. They remained the most popular until Pope published his renditions in the early eighteenth century. Though Pope and his style – elegant, clear, satirical, moralizing, rational, epigrammatic – were prized by that quintessential Romantic, Lord Byron, many others of the Romantic generation turned away from him towards earlier, craggier poets. After reading Pope's Homer, Keats must have found Chapman's closer to what he felt Homer should be: powerful, primal – somewhat rough and wild, mighty and sublime. It's ironic that one of the most familiar poems in English is a description of what it's like to come across a new poem that blows your mind open.

Keats positions himself throughout not just as an explorer, but one who seeks out the farthest reaches of the world. These territories/poets he has explored are not only at the boundaries of human knowledge, they are described in fanciful and legendary terms, and all these qualities are suitable for poetry. He begins by mentioning the realms of gold, which brings to mind the fabulous El Dorado; goodly states and kingdoms to my mind brings up images from medieval romance, as does the feudal notion of fealty, that is, a vassal's sworn loyalty, in this case to not to a king or baron but to Apollo, the Greek god of (among other things) music and poetry; the western islands suggest lands out where the sun sets, that is, at the very edge of the world (the term can also refer to the Outer Hebrides, a group of islands off the west coast of northern Scotland, which puts them near the edge of Europe).

In the second quatrain, Keats sums up the mighty reputation of Homer: he has often been told of the Greek poet, whom he describes as deep-browed, which suggests a profundity of thought and feeling, and aptly echoes the famous Homeric epithets (the wine-dark sea; Hector, breaker of horses). The territory Homer rules is both wide and an expanse: the terms mutually reinforce a sense of great breadth in the Greek poet, with an implication in expanse that this already broad sweep can only increase. Yet Keats has never truly grasped the reason for this great reputation – until he reads Chapman's translation. He describes it in two ways that help convey the power of Homer. First, continuing the comparison of reading poetry to traveling in foreign lands, he can now breathe the pure serene of Homer (serene here means an expanse of clear and calm sky): that is, he is lifted up, elevated (and perhaps this is a foreshadowing of the heady air upon the peak in Darien) into a state of simplicity and nobility. (These are two of the qualities that Matthew Arnold would insist, years later, were essential to a successful translation of Homer: simplicity, nobility, directness, and rapidity.) Yet Chapman is also loud and bold, with an essential energy and vigor to bring life to the epic poet's monumental and sublime qualities.

Having established that he is an experienced traveler in the far reaches of poetry, that he has heard much of the great Homer, and that he never fully appreciated him until he read Chapman's translation, Keats then uses the final sestet to convey the emotional impact of the discovery. He continues the theme of himself as an explorer, but this discovery has now moved him beyond the earthly realm into the universal: he feels like "some watcher of the skies" who finds a new planet orbiting into his ken, that is, his range of knowledge and/or sight. This isn't just fanciful; Uranus was discovered by Sir William Herschel a few years before Keats was born, and Neptune and Pluto were only noted long after his death; scientific advances must have brought with them an exciting sense of a rapidly expanding, even explosive, growth of world-changing knowledge.

The striking final comparison contains one of the famous errors in English poetry, up there with the seacoast that Shakespeare gave Bohemia: stout Balboa, not stout Cortez, was the first European explorer who crossed the isthmus of Panama and brought back to the wider world knowledge of the vast ocean that would be named Pacific. (Stout in this context means brave or intrepid, not portly.) Well, as they say, even Homer nods. Perhaps Keats misremembered because he was drawn to the crisp sound of Cortez. It's still a terrific image: the searching eagle eyes, the mountaintop in the rough uncultivated terrain they named Darien, the vast and glittering expanse of water, hitherto unknown, that stunned the men into silence as they almost helplessly stare at each other, overcome by a sudden psychic leap forward into knowledge that will leave their map of the world forever altered.

I took this from the Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of John Keats, edited by John Barnard.

Friday photo 2015/28

statue of Willie Mays outside of AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, 1 July 2015

What I Did for Love: Heart-Shaped Nebula at Shotgun Players

I ended up at one of the preview performances of Shotgun Players' Heart-Shaped Nebula, by Marisela Treviño Orta, directed by Desdemona Chiang. It starts off as a relatively realistic drama about Miqueo (Hugo Carbajal) , a man in his thirties, who is still recovering from the death in a car accident years before of his longtime girlfriend Dalila (Marilet Martinez). He encounters Amara (Gisela Feied), described in the website's synopsis as "a rebellious teenager who is more than she appears to be," and the story gradually takes off into realms of magical realism. Since it was a new play, and a preview, none of us knew much more than that. Before it started I was chatting with the older woman in the seat behind me, who was diminutive but with a pleasingly self-reliant and weathered look, as if she'd spent a lot of time on a ranch. Suddenly she burst out, "I'm not too sure about this play! All this magical crap – it's just too Berkeley for me!"

There was no intermission and I didn't get a chance to ask her afterwards what she thought, but I have to say that I found the magical elements pretty charming (in both senses of both words) – it was the realistic elements that I had problems with.

Miqueo and Dalila grow up in Texas; she is passionately interested in science, particularly astronomy, and he grows up to be an artist specializing in murals. He has returned to a significant spot in the desert where the stars are clear to seek some sort of end to his grieving for her. We find this out gradually, as he tells his story to Amara. "Rebellious teen" Amara has broken into his hotel room and stolen some of the items he wants to bury, in particular a ring from his dead sweetheart. Miqueo returns to his room and realizes she's stolen the ring and he wants it back. Clearly the obvious thing to do is call the police, and the playwright realizes she needs to deal with this obvious objection and get the two talking. So Miqueo pulls out his phone, and Amara threatens to accuse him of attempted rape – and, since she's thirteen, that would be child molestation as well.

Sorry, this is not the behavior of a "rebellious teen": this is the behavior of a sociopath. Petty theft: not OK! Blackmail and false accusations of rape and pedophilia? Really, really not OK! (Anyone who thinks otherwise should check out Shotgun's reading of Hellman's The Children's Hour, coming up in January.) And if he really did try to rape her, why would he be calling the police and getting himself in trouble? No sane man would spend another minute alone with someone like that. Instead, he caves in, gives her his leftover pizza, and starts telling her the story of his great love. That is far more fantastical and improbable than the most extravagant manifestations of the wildest magical realist. It's not that I don't believe a girl would issue such a threat, or that a man would be stupid enough to give in to her blackmail; it's that he would then proceed to open up to her about the most significant events of his life. This sort of thing happens only on the dramatic stage; in real life, such an encounter would produce only sorrow and the sordid.

I felt that Treviño Orta was spending too much time on the mechanics of getting these two together, and doing it in a way that smacked of stagecraft rather than anything approximating real life. There were other, simpler ways she could have had them meet that would obviate the need for unsatisfactory explanations as to why they were together and talking: they could encounter each other in the desert, at an all-night diner, on the streets of Vegas where Amara has been doing a magic shadow show that turns out to echo significantly something from Miqueo's past (one of the first clues that Amara has a role besides petty thief and blackmailer). Almost anything else would have been better, because after about the first fifteen minutes I'm contemptuous of them both, and that's a lot to come back from in a 90-minute play.

It's a tribute to the script and the director and the actors (though I thought they were still feeling their way into their roles; it was a preview after all) that they did come back from that beginning. There were themes and metaphors drawn from science and mythology (the two meet in the constellations we claim to see in the stars) that were well-done and engaging. But awkward questions kept coming up: Dalila is terrified of darkness and has to have a flashlight with her in case she needs the light to dispel an anxiety attack. That flashlight failed two, maybe three times, and I'm thinking, Why wouldn't you carry a spare with you? I think the playwright's idea of moving slowly from realism to magical realism was a good one, but for me was the realistic parts were not real enough, and the magical parts were a bit too lovely.

I thought the play could maybe have used some of the grit and ugliness of reality. One danger with magical realism is that everything can get too pretty, your love becomes too momentous, and has an emotional significance that can seem (to outsiders) too much like wish-fulfillment. There's only one brief line in which Miqueo mentions how all of his non-Dalila relationships, with family, friends, and lovers, have failed. I would have liked to hear more about that, the ways in which he thinks they've failed, and why. I think we're meant to find his final reunion with Dalia heart-warming and inspiring, but to me it's awful and ludicrous that Miqueo can't find any meaning in his life after Dalila's early death: the play is all about feeling that a certain type of love is the only thing that matters (and remember: only one per customer!). And I just don't share that feeling. (I wonder if anyone middle-aged does?)

There was enough in this play that was compelling and promising so that I would be interested in seeing other plays by Treviño Orta, though I did feel this one was a mixed bag: there's some ungainly and, to my mind, unsuccessful dramaturgy in the first half, and then a lush romanticism in the second half that – well, I was going to say "that I don't respond to," but that's not quite true; maybe such stories need the stylization of the operatic stage and the beyond-speech power of music to unhook them enough from daily life. But even music isn't always enough, and I will admit that the failure there is probably mine. During this play I kept thinking about La Bohème: a great and beloved work, and if you told me it was your favorite opera of all time I would respect that and understand why, but . . . though I see where it's going, I can't quite follow it there.

(The second photograph shows one of the eye-catching murals, different for each show, that get painted outside the Ashby Stage; you can read more about them here.)

Tomato Tuesday 2015/9

Due to drought restrictions I'm still watering the tomatoes only twice a week, though walking back to my house on Sunday afternoon I saw (not for the first time) a grim elderly woman on my block lavishly spraying water all over her cement front yard and her driveway, with the extra running off onto the sidewalk and into the gutter, and I wondered what good my careful conservation really does and whether we're all just doomed, if not through our stupidity then through that of others, which is worse. I had stopped filling my birdbath a while ago, partly because the local wandering cats have discovered it so the birds stopped using it, but Sunday morning as I did my semiweekly watering I saw some of the cats lurking around, which in itself was kind of unusual because, as I have previously mentioned, they bolt at the sight of me, cruelly shredding my little fantasies of cultivating charming and mutually beneficial cat friendships with them, so I filled the birdbath. The cats must have been truly thirsty because despite my continued presence they hopped up to the water and began lapping without stopping. There were two of them, both with a beautiful pattern of spots and stripes on their grey fur, and they look enough alike to make me think they are related. One clearly seemed dominant, and was the first to drink.

They tolerated me and my camera in order to drink my water, but clearly were a bit suspicious of what I was doing.

They just did not like it at all.

After the initial quenching of their thirst, they resumed bolting at my entrance. I did some random weed-pulling and suchlike and then left the house for a while. When I returned in the afternoon, the birdbath was bone-dry. The water couldn't be evaporating that quickly. I guess they returned once I was out of the way.

I'm a little concerned that the reduction in watering is starting to affect the tomatoes. We've had some hot and fairly muggy days, and this weekend I noticed that a number of tomato plants had leaves that used to be dark green and were now yellow. Below you can see a sample from Mr Stripey (actual heirloom name).

My peonies and columbines did not do very well this year, and I also noticed a big dying patch on my rosemary bush. Rosemary is a tough plant, and I thought the rain we did receive this year would be enough for it. Maybe it's too large and would do better if I cut it back radically, so that there is less of it needing water which it's not getting. In another sign of the drought, ants have invaded my house (again) and are all over the yard, particularly the tomato plants – perhaps they're finding water there. They also end up all over me, which I do not care for.

Despite all these signs of drought stress, I noticed that one of my Beurre d'Anjou pear trees is sprouting some tender velvety new leaves, their pale yellow-green bordered with a blush of pale mauve. So there's that, at least. Maybe I'll get some fruit from one of those trees this fall. I planted them a few years ago, and in my experience it usually takes a year or two for a fruit tree to start producing.

Once again, Michael Pollan is on the left and Cherokee Purple on the right. Both continue to grow extravagantly; both are now about 37 inches high, and quite bushy.

I've realized the plants are now at the point at which counting blossoms doesn't tell much; both now have many blossoms, in various stages from tiny buds to large buds to blooms to withering flowers. Those last are the most important, as their next stage is to turn into the fruit, and the season is advanced enough so that it's now all about counting the fruit.

Michael Pollan now has seven fruits, all of them fairly small and some of them quite small. They have an oval and sort of flat shape.

Below are some of the flowers from Cherokee Purple, which now has four fruits.

Here is this week's shot of the two Cherokee Purples that were new last week. The larger one, on the left, was 2 1/2 inches wide last week; this week it is 3 1/4 inches. If I can find my "softer" tape measure I'll get the circumference.

Here's a random shot of the lemon tree, which is old and large, though not as large as it used to be since some big overladen branches have broken off during winter storms, back when we used to have those. The lemons are smaller than they used to be, and over the past few years I've seen more that are disturbingly misshapen.

Below is another view of Flower Girl, the rose I showed last week.

And near Flower Girl is this sturdy Chinese Lantern, which proved its resilience over the past few years by coming back strong after having its main stem broken not once but twice – in both cases, by a cat jumping off the wall and landing on it. So the plant is not as tall as it might be, but it blooms regularly and looks healthy and in general keeps on keeping on.

Love & Information & the vague feeling "Is that all there is?"

On a recent Tuesday I went to the Strand Theater, newly renovated and redeemed from its porn house past by the American Conservatory Theater, to see their inaugural production, Caryl Churchill's Love and Information, directed by Casey Stangl. ACT did a beautiful job with the theater, which is now some kind of Platonic ideal of the small "black box" theater. They must have stripped it completely inside, because there is little to remind you that the theater was built in 1917. The lobby is clean and bright and stripped down with a streamlined and eternally modern chrome-and-glass look, with a large electronic board in the lobby. It seems designed to appeal to the nearby tech workers, allegedly all youthful and rich and masters of the future, that arts groups so fervently hope will become hooked on live performance.

The interior of the theater and the marquee are a lively red. Large trees wave outside on Market Street. The low evening sun brightens the little café in the lobby. The theater is conveniently located just steps from the Civic Center BART station. But the dignified and friendly doorman is a reminder that the surrounding area is still a bit dicey, despite such continued efforts at social uplift as the nearby Twitter headquarters and the fancy markets and indeed the renovated Strand Theater itself. When I arrived the doorman was talking to someone so, in an effort not to interrupt him, I started to go for the other glass door. He politely stopped me and opened the door he was standing in front of for me. Clearly an eye is being kept on who comes in and out. (I'm not necessarily complaining about that, by the way.)

I did not have anything at the café, but the theater-goers who did seemed to be enjoying themselves. Considering the care shown in the renovation, I was surprised at the bathrooms (well – the men's room; I have no idea about the women's room), which seemed inadequate even for a theater with only 283 seats. The seats themselves are not exactly outrageously comfortable but I was pleased to see that they all had their own armrests (so no need for a land-grab struggle with your neighbor) as well as a sliver of space between each seat. The rows were also banked enough to give good sightlines throughout the house. Clearly thought had been put into the arrangements.

As I was waiting for the play to begin I took a couple of photographs of the inside of the theater and the lone usher walked over and gently but firmly told me that photography was not allowed inside the theater. I did not point out the number of people using cellphone cameras and simply apologized, as I thought the photography ban applied only during performances. Nope, none at all: "It's just like the Geary Theater," she said. But I rarely go to the Geary anymore. ACT does a number of plays each season I'd like to see, but then I look at their schedule, and they have maybe one workweek 7:00 start time for the entire run, and then I look at their prices, and my jaw drops and a cold Brechtian sense of harsh economic reality sets in – honestly, I get six plays at Shotgun for just a bit more than the cost of one orchestra seat at ACT, and (again, honestly) I've had better times at Shotgun. High prices and 8:00 start times during the work week – that's why I think of ACT as "theater for the Peninsula but in San Francisco."

But I was curious to see the new Strand, and I had a special e-mail offer from ACT: to commemorate the new Strand Theater, tickets for certain performances of Love & Information would be priced $19.17 to mark the year it was built. That, plus a 7:30 start time, sounded good to me. And (once again: honestly) if I'd paid more than that (I think regular tickets are around $90) I would not have been happy with my evening, as the play itself struck me as mostly OK and not much more.

We get a series of brief scenes, moments really, that flash by, leaving you to draw connections and make inferences. But that probably makes it sound more interesting than it was, as each of the brief scenes, despite the skill and charm of the actors, each playing multiple roles, struck too many familiar notes with me – in fact, some of them I swear I had heard before. Nothing too ambiguous or suggestive or surreal happens; mostly we get little vignettes that seem like the highlighted moments of "realistic" "social issue" dramas that would be really boring at full length. Apparently Churchill's script consists only of the lines of dialogue, without speakers assigned, so that the company has to decide who is speaking what and even who is who. This would require an exploration during rehearsals that may make the play seem, to those involved in the process, daring and suggestive in a way that it is not for someone just sitting in the auditorium for one night.

I would not say I was bored during the one hour and forty minute run time (no intermission, thank God), but I also was not particularly engaged. It may be a twist that the old former lovers reminiscing about their days together are both men, or that the two using dream interpretation as a justification for their adulterous affair are both women, but the scenes themselves aren't up to much beyond the mildly interesting, and same-sex couples barely register as a novelty these days. I mean, I was glad to see them, and the use of a multi-racial cast, but that's the world around us and it would be pretty sad at this point if the theater didn't reflect that.

The marketing of the play implied that it would reflect how tech/social media were changing our personal relationships, and I can understand why they would play up that angle considering who now has money around here, but fortunately only a few scenes really depend on (please note that I did not say "examine") tech/social media – and, again, that is just the world around us, and nothing was said on that front that wasn't already familiar. "Information" is used in a much broader sense, and can mean things like the convenient dream interpretation I mentioned earlier, or gossip about mutual friends, or a remark that betrays romantic interest, or even a rash on a young man's body that gives his girlfriend pause: how do we get information, and how do we act when we get it? A few scenes make the point that fear can also be a valuable piece of emotional information that we might be wise to act on. But again I'm afraid I'm making this all sound more interesting than it was to experience. Churchill's script seemed mostly banal to me. One of the tech-related scenes showed a middle-aged employee bursting into the office of his young boss to berate him for firing him via e-mail. This is a scenario we've seen often, maybe too often, the whole "you are young and do not know how to behave with decency" thing, and nothing much was added here except a sense that they weren't quite getting it right: these things are done now in a way that prevents disgruntled workers from bursting into the manager's office (assuming that the office itself hasn't been replaced with one of those horrible Panopticon "open offices."). A number of the scenes have this air of something conventional but not quite right (like the one of a white woman office worker sitting having a conversation with a slightly crazed black male streetperson: I have worked in the Financial District for years and have seen plenty of both types of person and they just do not interact in this way).

In another tech-related scene, a man, maybe around thirty, goes to visit his father at his remote country house. The son of course is constantly using his phone, because that's what those young people are like these days!, only out where his father dwells there is no reception. In fact the father seems to live a life of almost monastic austerity (which people rarely do without a guiding philosophy, but if there was one we weren't given it, which was probably just as well since I can easily imagine it). So when it turns out there's no cellphone reception, no TV, no radio, the son asks his father what he does when he needs a weather forecast. I didn't hear his response because the woman two seats down from me announced loudly and smugly, "You look out the window!" But in the great tradition of audience remarks that interrupt a performance, she was both boringly obvious and completely incorrect: looking out the window will tell you what the weather is like outside the window. It will not necessarily tell you what the forecast is.

I did like some things in the play, especially a recurring bit with a silent older woman, looking depressed and brow-beaten, beyond the reach of those around her, that is, those who actually bothered to notice her and try to reach her. But the whole thing felt like a path we've walked down many times, ending at a place that is no great shakes. I might as well stop here. I would like to repeat that the actors – Joel Bernard, Anthony Fusco, Cindy Goldfield, Dan Hiatt, Joe Holt, Rafael Jordan, Christina Liang, Sharon Lockwood, Leo Marks, Dominique Salerno, Mia Tagano, and Shona Tucker – were all skillful and appealing, and I felt that the humdrum qualities of the evening were due to Churchill and not the performers. The theater itself is an attractive and welcome addition to the area, and I hope to be back there soon for something more interesting. The run continues until 9 August.

Poem of the Week 2015/27

On Reading Dryden's Virgil

Now cease these tears, lay gentle Virgil by,
Let recent sorrows dim the pausing eye:
Shall Aeneas for lost Creusa mourn,
And tears be wanting on Abella's urn?
Like him I lost my fair one in my flight
From cruel foes – and in the dead of night.
Shall he lament the fall of Illian's tow'rs,
And we not mourn the sudden ruin of our's?
See York on fire – while borne by winds each flame
Projects its glowing sheet o'er half the main:
Th' affrighted savage, yelling with amaze,
From Allegany sees the rolling blaze.
Far from these scenes of horror, in the shade
I saw my aged parent safe convey'd;
Then sadly follow'd to the friendly land,
With my surviving infant by the hand.
No cumb'rous houshold gods I had indeed
To load my shoulders, and my flight impede;
The hero's idols sav'd by him remain;
My gods took care of me – not I of them!
The Trojan saw Anchises breathe his last,
When all domestic dangers he had pass'd.
So my lov'd parent, after she had fled,
Lamented, perish'd on a stranger's bed.
– He held his way o'er the Cerulian Main,
But I return'd to hostile fields again.

Ann Eliza Bleecker

As previously noted, the first local performance in almost half a century of Berlioz's epic opera Les Troyens has been a big thing around here and has left us in an Aeneid mood. In addition, as I type this I'm surrounded by a barrage of explosions from illegal fireworks for the Fourth of July (an especially irritating way to celebrate it this year because the lengthy and severe drought has made the whole landscape kindling). So it seemed like serendipity when the anthology I picked up while searching for a poem for this week opened to this Revolutionary War-era reflection on reading The Aeneid.

Since this poem is autobiographical, you will need some information on Bleecker. (And since she compares her life with Aeneas's, you will need some information on him as well: Creusa is his wife, who died during the fall of Troy (referred to here as Illian's/Ilium's towers), and Anchises is his father, whom he carried out of the burning city.) Back to Bleecker: born in 1752 and descended from prosperous Dutch merchants, she and her husband were living near Albany, New York, when the Revolutionary War began. After General Burgoyne invaded from Canada, her husband joined the state militia. While he was off fighting, Bleecker had to flee her home with the other women in her family: her mother, her sister, and her two young daughters, Abella and Margaretta. The infant Abella died of dysentery during their flight. Her mother died while they were still refugees. Her sister died as they were returning to their home, and her husband was captured by Loyalist troops, a series of tragedies and troubles that led Bleecker to a miscarriage and a breakdown. She survived the war but for the remainder of her life was subject to fits of intense depression, and she died, still a young woman, in 1783. Her surviving daughter, Margaretta, collected and published her mother's works in 1793. In addition to her poems, Bleecker wrote novels, including The History of Maria Kittle, one of the earliest examples of the Indian Captivity narrative (in which a white settler, often a woman, is kidnapped by Indians). Like many white settlers, she had troubled relations with and negative views of the local native peoples, as reflected here in her lines about the frightened savages.

Dryden's translation of the great epic of Augustan Rome was less than a century old when Bleecker read it, though it was already seen as a classic version. In her poem, Bleecker's tears over Aeneas's losses lead her to reflect on their strange similarity to her own wartime losses, despite their differences in time, place, and personality (the imaginative sympathy with which she makes the connection might be seen as a possible response to Hamlet's question, "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?"). She reinforces the link by using the same form as Dryden, the heroic couplet (that is, two rhyming lines in iambic pentameter, usually forming self-contained grammatical units). The life of this young American refugee wife finds an echo in the ancient Trojan hero's struggles.

She draws parallels between their plights: both lost a beloved family member during a night-time flight from a burning city. Both saw their homes destroyed by invaders. But she also draws distinctions: the famously dutiful Aeneas fled Troy while carrying his household gods, which Bleecker contemptuously refers to as "cumb'rous" (that is, cumbersome, clumsy and unwieldy) idols that could only weigh him down, whereas instead of having to save her gods, the Christian Bleecker was saved by them (though I assume she refers to "her gods" for symmetry, and means her God, or possibly she's referring to the Trinity, or borrowing Milton's usage gods to refer to angels). Furthermore, Aeneas was able to see his father die in some degree of peace and comfort, while her mother died among strangers, still separated from her family. And finally, after his escape from his devastated home the Trojan hero has a firm purpose (he "held his way"), crossing "the Cerulian [cerulean] Main" (that is, the deep blue sea) towards glory and the foundation of a great empire – whereas she, the victim of a different empire's turmoil, sees no escape from her wanderings among potential war zones.

I took this poem from American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, an anthology edited by David S. Shields for the Library of America.

Friday photo 2015/27

on Jackson Street, San Francisco, July 2014

Tomato Tuesday 2015/8

Starting off with a random rose this week: this is Flower Girl, which produces billows of these classically simple flowers, massed together like pink clouds, nodding with the passing breezes. That plant has done quite well; sometimes you just stick a plant in a fortunate spot and it thrives. You also need a healthy plant to start with, of course.

I was taking pictures of the lavender in front of Flower Girl when a white butterfly fluttered through. I managed to get it in one of the photographs before it flew off. The lavender is planted by the side of the house, which gets a lot of afternoon sun at this time of year. That's why the flowers are all bending forward – that's where the sun is. I've also noticed that one of the trees on the front lawn gets its leaves earliest and loses them last on the side that faces that afternoon sun, leaving it with a lopsided look in spring and autumn.

We've had some hot days, of the sort in which my only consolation is to think, Well, it's good for the tomatoes, and also some overcast days, but those have been muggy rather than cool. The tomatoes are doing quite well so far with the reduced watering schedule (roughly two days a week). Once again, in the photo below Michael Pollan is on the left and Cherokee Purple on the right. You can see that they're both looking quite healthy, and Michael Pollan (34 inches this week, up from 30 last week) seems catching up in bushiness with Cherokee Purple (roughly the same height this week as last, 31 inches).

I'm in the middle of an extremely busy stretch of days and that was one reason I decided not to count blossoms this week. The other, more compelling reason is that while new buds are appearing on both plants the older flowers are starting to drop off and form fruit. I probably should have counted anyway, and now I'm thinking it's going to bother me that I didn't, but as I said: extremely busy stretch of days.

Here are some flowers on Michael Pollan:

And here are some on Cherokee Purple:

And look what happened to Cherokee Purple while I was off being extremely busy!

To give you a sense of scale, the larger tomato is 2 1/2 inches wide. You can see the interesting pleated shape that is one of the reasons heirloom tomatoes were abandoned by large growers (they're harder to ship and their fruit is not "picture perfect" unless you have a taste for grotesquerie and baroque pearls). I also noticed a little green oval fruit forming on Michael Pollan, so it's keeping up with Cherokee Purple on that front as well.

Poem of the Week 2015/26

Little Lyric (Of Great Importance)

I wish the rent
Was heaven sent.

Langston Hughes

Some Langston Hughes to mark the halfway point of this year. There is an old tradition, going back to the Greek and Latin poets and no doubt even predating them among now-lost oral cultures, of the epigram, a concise and well-turned expression of a universal truth (sometimes in the guise of a personal jab). Hughes gives us an excellent example, combining his interest in colloquial speech – you can easily imagine someone actually saying this – in social justice, and in poetic form. I think we don't need much explication here; I'm sure we've all said or sighed the same thing. Hughes really hits home here (home, as long as you can pay the rent!).

I took this from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad, editor, and David Roessel, Associate Editor.

Friday photo 2015/26

grass shadows on the sidewalk, San Leandro, April 2015