Tuesday, September 23, 2014

EQUINOX & Notre Anniversaire de Mariage


When I trace at my pleasure the winding to and fro of the heavenly bodies,
I no longer touch the earth with my feet.  I stand in the presence of Zeus himself
and take my fill of ambrosia.  Claudius Ptolemy


30+ years, but who's counting? 

Kevin, Gregory & I

Eugene Aget - The Lovers  Doorknocker, Paris

The Lovers


The last of the bees are
out extracting the last of the pollen from the lavender in our tiny garden. 
I will miss their industrious hum in the afternoons... 






                   
             ...and the last of the roses & their hips





Rosehips, Delphiniums, Tomatoes






Feeling the snap of fall, classic chilly mornings - by midmorning, the bright sun warming us like a good claret, elongated afternoon shadows falling across the fields and roads.  I'm still making rose hips tea and picking cherry tomatoes - we're like merry grasshoppers sipping the last days of summer; a premature fall, orchard apples falling on our heads.

Our wedding, Inverness, Ca. Richard &  Francine's Garden

I see the fall colors of a California wedding in the photo, mauves and dove greys, creams and beiges.  The priest (gay he was) now long departed, with his moustache and yellow flower.  After he performed our ceremony, he celebrated in a leather bar.  I see our brothers, Mark & Greg, big smiles in the photo.  Our friend's garden in Inverness, oh so long ago.  And now those guests do seem like dreams, some of them still arriving, others gone forever.  And that September day the Gods were indeed present, presiding over the ceremony, in the trees and in the music, the wedding song sung by Elizabeth and Denise, the poems read, and the life that unfurled in front of us. They were like the Medieval choristers (thank you Ruffles) who made the garden sing with their harmonics; their voices lifted in ethereal notes, pleasing all the Gods. 

I pull my memory away from "nostalgia," acute homesickness, sentimental longing, relocating it to my Memory Palace where love and affection have eternal rooms to inhabit, infinite beds to lie in, to sleep and dream.  I think of how memory lives on in us, reseeding itself like the gardens; to be borne again on Demeter's shoulders, with fresh hope, resting & readying the ground for the next harvest of poetic dreams.


Sky Arts Ignition:  Memory Palace - a work of fiction by Author Hari Kunzru

Mini Memory Palace - The Lovers Sandpainting*


* Sandpainting - gift from Kim Mott, Idaho Artist/Poet/Gardener/Dreamer

You were once wild here.  Don't let them tame you.  Isadora Duncan