The Scent of Hyacinths

For over a fortnight I have been sleeping in a bed of hyacinths!  Not literally of course – a Christmas gift of a basket of six blue hyacinths coming into bloom has been filling my bedroom with a fragrance that is as beautiful as it is hard to describe.  Floral.  Light.  Open.  Delicate.  Old-fashioned.  Sweet.  Sensual. Fresh.  Spring-like.  Surely part of its beauty is that no word can really catch it?

I can’t turn a smell

into a single word;

you’ve no right 

to ask…

From Jo Shapcott’s  Rosa odorata

The common hyacinth (Hyacinthus orientalis, in the family Asparagaceae) grows wild in Turkey and Israel, Northern Iran and Turkmenistan.  Wouldn’t that be a sight?  I remember being totally disorientated by scarlet amaryllis growing by the side of the roads in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas.  Rather like when you come across someone you know in a different setting – sometimes it’s hard to place them out of their familiar context.  I bumped into Billy Connolly the other day in Newcastle Arts Centre Café and spent far too long trying to remember which one of my friends he was married to…

In the language of aromatherapy, the fragrance of the hyacinth is soothing, calming, centring and sensual.  So it seems my instinct was right in choosing to put them on my bedroom windowsill.

When I was looking for poems about hyacinths, I was surprised to find only one – Louise Glück’s Hyacinth – a narrative sequence following the ancient Greek myth.  Hyacinth was a beautiful boy, beloved of Apollo and Zephyrus, the West Wind.  Apollo took great pleasure in teaching Hyacinth all the arts appropriate for a growing young man, including throwing the discus.  One day Hyacinth was badly injured by the discus and died.

Tiepolo’s The Death of Hyacinth, 1752

Some versions say Zephyrus was responsible for blowing it off course, jealous that Hyacinth favoured Apollo.  In his grief Apollo transformed his beloved into a flower to save him from death.  The petals are said to be marked with the god’s tears.  So the plant stands as a symbol of rebirth and as such is used to decorate the table at Persian New Year, which falls on Spring Equinox.

Beauty dies: that is the source

of creation.  Outside the ring of trees

the courtiers could hear

the dove’s call transmit

its uniform, its inborn sorrow –

They stood listening, among the rustling willows.

Was this the god’s lament?

They listened carefully.  And for a short time

all sound was sad.

I was away last weekend and when I returned and opened my front door, the whole house smelled of hyacinths.  It hit me in a great draught, like a faithful dog welcoming me home.  After weeks in full blossom the flowers are starting to lean with their own weight and I can detect a change in their scent, a ripe edge to their sweetness – intimations of decay.  Even as the boy dies, so must the flower.  I will save the bulbs and plant them in the garden to return if they will.  Though I haven’t had much luck with that strategy in the past.  If I had Apollo’s magic, at one stroke I would transform all my hungry rabbits into gorgeous scented flowers.

Nine Moons

 

Yesterday a small group of us gathered at Tea Sutra, the very lovely tea house on Leazes Park Road in Newcastle, run by my friends Akuppa and Yoshi, to write a 20-verse renga inspired by the spirit of the place.  As Renga Master, I’d made a schema to guide us based on the season, the moon and love, as is traditional, and various themes the setting suggested – the space itself, the five senses and lots of opportunities to write about tea!  We sampled many fragrant varieties between us throughout the day and these trickled their way into the renga at regular intervals.

It’s always strange making a renga in a ‘public’ place.  I remember our 24-hour 100- verse rengas at Baltic, Gateshead, and in the Camelia House at Yorkshire Sculpture Park – extra-strange because of the stretched time frame.  At Tea Sutra, we sat on a raised platform at one end of the room, only a little concealed by a bamboo screen and plants.  The hubbub of conversation in the cafe rose and fell as the day unfolded but we stayed where we were for six hours and wrote the renga below.  Read it slowly, preferably with a cup of your favourite tea beside you, and savour.

Nine Moons

Sunlight pierces

the wet skin

of city streets

 

‘tea sutra’

painted in shadows

 

steam curls from cup

warm breath

in winter

 

Sencha Kyoto Cherry Rose

scent of a new moon

 

a dark-clad figure

comes and goes

behind the orange curtain

 

your Assam leaves

in the metal strainer

 

the long narrow room

seven eastern windows

a floating island

 

something adventurous?

spicy citrus

 

clink of china

slow voices

the pour of water

 

falling in love again

never wanted to

 

facing the same direction

by accident

two elephants

 

steal me away

Oolong dragon

 

tracing the braille

of the blinds

their lost garden

 

she sips Yunnan

the queen’s favourite

 

1940s Newcastle

Carrick’s

before the trolley-bus home

 

a ‘quite large’ chocolate cookie

fissured like rock

 

with one finger

he circles nine moons

on the steamed glass

 

bamboo leaves

a shoal of green fish

 

how will Percy Street look

ledges splashed

with tulips?

 

when tomorrow comes

it will taste of sweet tea.

 

 

A genius loci renga

at Tea Sutra,

Leazes Park Road,

Newcastle upon Tyne,

on 21^st January, 2012.

 

Participants:

Akuppa

Birtley Aris

Linda France

Enid Lee

Ellen Phethean

 

More rengas, from various places and poets, have recently been added to the dhamma moon site – with a note about the shift from classical nijuuin towards ‘spirit of place’.  You can find these here.

Painting the Rainbow

Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.

John Ruskin

At this time of year one of the things we specialise in in my neck of the woods is mud. I try to be philosophical and forgiving but can’t help noticing a certain revulsion. I shrink from the dirt that inevitably collects on my boots and clothes and hands, following me home. I suppose you could get interested in it as a subject – but there are not many synonyms for the sort of wet black-brown of this particular churned earth.

So it’s been a delight to watch my Sinningia coming into flower and relish its intense velvety scarlet, catching the light on my windowsill. I bought it at a Moorbank NGS Open Day last year when it was just on the point of flowering, a single stalk rising from the corm, kept visible above the soil. A native of Brazil, I was astonished to see it coming back to life in my slightly chilly house so far north.  It is named after Wilhelm Sinning who worked at Bonn University Botanic Garden during the 19th century. A member of the genus Gesneriaceae (like the more familiar Gloxinia), it is sometimes known as Cardinal Flower, presumably because of the colour it shares with a cardinal’s robes. Flowers in this plant family are designed to be pollinated by hummingbirds, bats or sphinx moths.

This month in the Poetry Room (the book group I co-host with Anna Woodford, at Newcastle’s City Library) we read John Burnside’s Forward Prize-winning collection, Black Cat Bone (Cape 2011). These are poems filtered through a painterly eye, prismatic, exquisite. Presided over by the spirit of winter (many mentions of snow and ice and the colour white), there is barely a page that doesn’t introduce another colour into the palette. Blood leaves its mark, streaked through the entire book, as well as lots of black, blue, green, grey and silver. There are shadows, mist and fog, degrees of darkness enlivened by light of various kinds and the occasional detail picked out in bronze, auburn, celadon and murrey. This direct appeal to the visual sense is luxuriant, hedonic, seductive. We see what the poet sees, a brief glimpse of another world, unsettling, violent and comfortless.

It seems a fable and perhaps it is:

we live in peril, die from happenstance,

a casual slip, a fault line in the ice;

but surely it’s the other thought that matters,

the sense that, now and then, there’s still a chance

a man might slide towards an old

belonging, momentarily involved

in nothing but the present, skating out

towards a white

horizon, fair

and gifted with the grace

to skate forever, slithering as he goes,

but hazarding a guess that someone else

is close beside him, other to his other.

From Pieter Breughel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap, 1565

(inscribed a hundred years after it was painted with the words which translate as –

Learn from this picture how we journey in the world

Slithering as we go, the foolish and the wise)

As someone who doesn’t paint but who loves the nuance of colour, I revelled in Burnside’s chromatic experiments and appreciated the prompt to go back to Victoria Finlay’s wonderful book Colour (Hodder & Stoughton 2002), charting her travels in search of the mineral origins of paints and dyes, full of fascinating facts about ochre in Arnhemland and indigo in Calcutta and all the colours and histories and countries in between. An almost edible pleasure.

Carving the light from the moon to dye the mountain stream

Xu Yin

I hear that the ceramicist Edmund de Waal (The Hare with Amber Eyes) is working on a book exploring the colour white, its history in the manufacture of porcelain and all our associations with it. The no-colour that all colour is born from, the visual equivalent of silence, the blank page. I’m looking forward to it very much.

Since beginning this posting a heavy frost has fallen over the past few days transforming the landscape, softening the stridency of the mud even as it hardens it underfoot. The light is pervasive but deceptive, looking much warmer than it is. A timeless beauty, stripped back to the bone.

For those colours which you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.

Leonardo da Vinci

Bookish

There are so many books in my house it’s easy to lose track of them sometimes. I spent several days hunting for Germaine Greer’s Poems for Gardeners (Virago, 2003), an anthology of historical and contemporary garden-related poetry I’ve grown very fond of after rescuing it from someone’s recycling bin several years ago.

I finally found it ‘safe’ in one of the drawers of my desk, which I’ve recently moved downstairs so I can enjoy the view across to Stagshaw Fair and watch the light change. What I need is for some of the book fairies at Type bookshop in Toronto (click here for a rare sighting) to come and sort out my library. The light might take a while.

Epiphany

The Snowdrop

Already now the snowdrop dares appear,

The first pale blossom of th’unripen’d year;

As Flora’s breath, by some transforming power,

Had chang’d an icicle into a flower,

Its name and hue the scentless plant retains,

And winter lingers in its icy veins.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

1743 – 1825

risking themselves, the first

snowdrops, a hellebore

Late Air

a swivel to catch

moon coming up

sun going down

Despite it being a golden day – such a relief after the past storms – I was late in getting outdoors for a walk because I was chewing my pencil writing a poem.  Astonishing how long it can take to write just twelve lines…

For some time I’ve wanted to write about the radio mast I can see from my house – one of the touchstones of my night-time horizon.  In between Stanley and Consett, it’s called Pontop Pike and was built so that the good folk of the North East could watch the Coronation on TV in 1953.  At the moment it still emits both analogue and digital signals, but that will stop this September when the digital switchover is complete.

In her poem ‘Late Air’, Elizabeth Bishop writes about the lights on the Navy Yard aerial, ‘better witnesses/for love on summer nights’ than any love song on the radio – ‘Phoenixes/burning quietly, where the dew cannot climb.’  I always think of her poem when I look out of my stairhead window and pick out the lights of our own radio mast, a string of red in the orange glow of the city.  She wrote the poem when she was living in Key West and it was published in the Partisan Review in 1938.

One of my most treasured possessions is a watercolour illustration of ‘Late Air’ by my long-time collaborator Birtley Aris.  Without even knowing how important the poem was for me, he gave it me as a birthday present.  As if we’re all aerials, constantly transmitting more of ourselves than we think.

As well as overlaying Pontop Pike and Bishop’s poem, for my own poem I also had in mind some music a friend has given me to write some words for. Not quite a love song, but there’s an ache in it, which I think the most haunting songs seem to share.  The longing we send out into the air, whether sung or not.

You can listen to Elizabeth Bishop reading ‘Late Air’ here.

Dark Days, Restless Nights

constellations of molehills

buried stars, black holes

Stormy Weather

a postcard

from the West Wind

shattered glass

The gate of the year

cleaning the windows

to let the light shine through

January is the open gate of the year, shut until the shortest day passed, but now open to let in the lengthening daylight, which will soon fall upon dim patches of pale green, that shew where spring is still sleeping.

Chambers Book of Days, 1864

The Pollen Path

New Year’s Day

lilies flush

with unspent pollen

Pollen is fascinating in itself and for what it represents, literally and figuratively rich. Lily pollen is intense, resinous, leaving a hard-to-budge stain on whatever brushes against it. I know some people cut off the anthers to save the mess but I rather like the way they let themselves go with waxy orange abandon and refuse to be tidy, obedient to our need for order. They are full of life, fragrant and irrepressible.

Looking it up, I learn that each pollen grain contains vegetative cells and one generative cell. The group of cells is surrounded by a cellulose-rich wall and a resistant outer wall composed largely of something called sporopollenin. Pollen is produced in the microsporangium, within the ‘male’ parts of a plant. It seems to be the equivalent of sperm in animals.

The grains come in a wide variety of shapes (mostly spherical), sizes and surface markings characteristic of the different species. Pollen grains of pines, firs and spruces are winged. The smallest pollen grain is that of the forget-me-not at around 0.006 mm diameter. Wind-borne pollen grains are larger. There are some amazing images of pollen seen through electro-scanning microscopes. Forensic scientists and archeologists are keen on the study of pollen (palynology) as it helps them track and date specimens.

These are pollen grains from sunflower, morning glory, prairie hollyhock, evening primrose and castor bean.

I first came across the idea of the pollen path through the work of Joseph Campbell.  He describes the Navaho ritual that reflects lifting the focus beyond the basic animal level of survival to intimations of the heartwood, what makes us human. Pollen is the life source and the pollen path is the path to the centre. The Navaho prayer goes like this:

Oh, beauty before me,

beauty behind me,

beauty to the right of me,

beauty to the left of me,

beauty above me,

beauty below me,

I’m on the pollen path.

It’s intriguing how closely this echoes The Deer’s Cry, the ‘Breastplate Prayer’ of St Patrick, so named because it is the breastplate that protects the heart.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Margaret Schevill-Link has written a book on Navaho myths (called The Pollen Path).  She quotes another blessing:

Be still within yourselves

and know the trail is beautiful.

Whenever you are in danger

walk carefully and quietly.

Your feet will be blessed with pollen

and your hands will be blessed with pollen.

Let your minds and your voices

go forward on the pollen path.

Last night at Harnham we celebrated the New Year, letting go the old and welcoming the new, with our traditional Ritual of Forgiveness and Aspiration.  I love this time of year, even more than Christmas.  It’s a wonderful chance to look again at what we choose to pollinate in our own lives.  I wish all of you reading this a New Year rich with pollen – with seed, blossom and fruit.