Queen Charlotte Sound and the Kaikoura Coast

To continue the belated postings from New Zealand...

Gene, Paul and I flew to the South Island and enjoyed a great lunch at a winery near Nelson. What pleasure to be able to go wine tasting and then enjoy my favorite glass of Pinot Noir at lunch overlooking the vineyards. That evening we heard a contemporary classical music concert at church, featuring San Francisco guitarist, David Tannenbaum--we do indeed live in a global village.

The next day we headed south toward Queen Charlotte Sound, dealing with the now usual drama of trying to drive on the other side of the road. My favorite trick is turning on the windshield wipers when I really want to hit the turn signal.




A photograph of the Sound from a particularly scenic pull out, that also featured a short hike. The sound of cicadas was overwhelming, drowning out all out sounds--imagine a wall of insect sound.





Am I wearing a bathing suit? A quick stop at a local watering hole on the Pelorus River for a dunk.




And then on to the our three day trek on the Kaikoura Coast Trail, which was built by three farms along the coast who got together to organize a tramp through their properties. I call it backpacking light. We carried day packs and our food for the day, while our bags we transported from farm to farm for us. We stayed each night at the different farm.






The first day, we hiked over the coastal mountain range to the sea. The photograph above is looking north, taken from a rest hut, where we treated ourselves to tea and a nap (for some). We hiked through forest and then emerged into the rolling hills you see here.







Not a lot of flowers along the route, but this one caught my eye.




Our second day entailed a long hike along a rocky beach. Rough on my feet, but Gene was having a good time.







The sandstone cliffs were quite friable. Remarkable were "fossil" shells embedded in the rock. I picked up a small piece of one and put it in my backpack. It was dust by the time we got to the farm.


























Amazing what a little paint will do to touch up the flora!



Can you tell it's windy?




Our last look at the sea, before we headed back over the coastal range.

Rangitoto

Aside from its incarnation as a work of art, Rangitoto is a volcanic island, just off the coast of Auckland in New Zealand. It is a young soul: by the standards of islands, it is only 600 years old. I read that the Maori who were already living in New Zealand were awed at its creattion. Imagine a volcanic eruption creating land out of fire and sea.




This view is from the peak which we hiked up on a warm summer's day. Auckland is beautiful. Funny how cities can look calm through the haze of distance and blue skies.


The island is made entirely of black, jagged volcanic rock that was killer on my boots. I admit I am a klutz, but by the end of the hike, my soles were shredded.









Some people got tired on the hike and needed an afternoon nap. I hate naps. As AE Houseman wrote,

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad; when the journey's over
There'll be time enough for sleep.

A Rainy Day in San Francisco

At last a weekend at home. And the rain was falling. I ate breakfast to the sound of rain splattering against the skylight in a darkened kitchen. Ah that "good to be inside, reading by the fire" feeling. I hope the Sierras get much needed snow. This print captures my rainy day mood today: the solitary hut, trees bare but just starting to bloom, the hope of a wet green spring and the heat of summer to come.

The woodblock print is by Shiro Kasamatsu, entitled Suenaga District in Rain, 1939.

Waiheke Island

Art and nature, artifice or landscape. An outdoor sculpture display on Waiheke Island made for a great art walk/tramp (the New Zealand lingo for a hike.)




Seek a relentless clarity
which frames the soul



drinking a glass of the wine dark sea
in a harbor of shadow and sun




only connect...
with fragile bands of thread
to earth and dust, ourselves




Dickinson's certain slant of light
this crossing, those other journeys
to be endured



sinews of steel,
our carpace of flesh,
yearning for release.

A Rainy Day in Hawaii

Who could resist a day in Hawaii, even a rainy misty one? The destination for a few short hours was Manoa Falls and an arboretum near by. Abundance and lushness. Mud and bamboo. The question arose as to whether bamboo is indigenous to the Hawaiian islands or was introduced by Polynesians or Europeans. I ventured perhaps it was from China, a notion Gene found extremely amusing. He then asked whether the mud getting all over us our boots and legs was imported from China as well. Ah the humble beginnings of a running joke. The mud however, would hold us up in customs in New Zealand, when a rather dour-looking officer temporarily confiscated our boots and sterilized them.


The flowers on our short hike were stunning.





The rain conspired to make each more beautiful than the last.

And then there were the wild orchids...

Journey to the East

Cape May, New Jersey which is at the southern-most end of the New Jersey shore is a beautiful city that was shrouded in snow and clouds and cold this time of year. It sports many beautiful old Victorians (houses that is). There's something forlorn about a seaside resort shuttered for winter. I was attending a weekend poetry retreat/workshop which provided "prompts" for writing new poems and for working outside my usual poet's box. It was good too see old friends, Susan and Alyssa with whom I had worked with in Provincetown at the Fine Arts Work Center a couple of summers ago.

Here's a photograph of the late afternoon sky from the balcony of the hotel. the blues were particularly textured, almost creamy.



NEW YORK was the first stop on the trip for culture and entertainment. Ah my home city, drawing me back again. Coming full circle, returnings and yearnings. It is difficult to stay away though the cold makes me appreciate living in CA. It was a pleasure to hear the New York Philharmonic with Dudamel conducting a rousing Mahler's Fifth, the New York City Opera performing Barber's Antony and Cleopatra and the MET performing Gluck's Orpheo with choreography by Mark Morris. As an added benefit, the city provided, snow--how lovely, at least for a few hours.

Inauguration Day

Wow, I am watching Barak Obama walk George Bush to the helicopter that is taking away 8 years of disaster. There's laughter as it heads into the sky.

Enough, at last.

To new beginnings. How moving that a poet reads her words right after the Inaugural Address was delivered.

Sunday Concerts

On a clear and relatively warm Jan. Sunday in SF, I let myself get swept up in the Whirlwind--3 events this afternoon. Two half concerts sandwiched by a party.

The SF Symphony performed Aaron Copland's music from the movie version of Thorton Wilder's Our Town. Slow, majestic in its simplicity, quintessentially American and so Copland.

I recall reading the play on a car trip with my parents driving back from Washington DC to New York, in one of the world's worst cars--our Chevrolet Chevette. I must have been in Junior High School. My inexplicable weeping as I finished the play disturbed my mother until I explained the reason. I was a "sensitive" child, after all. I still find the play quite moving, though at this point overdone. And who can forget Robby Benson in a made for TV version?

Alas, my 70's paperback of the play is missing, which is a real loss. I love the yellowing pages of those volumes and how they fall apart as the cheap glue that had held them together dries into dust. I just cracked the spine (literally of the 21st edition of another Bantam paperback edition with three of Wilder's play in it) to reread the ending. Ah, ah the stage manager...... who of course has the last word:

"Yes it's clearing up. there are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strains' so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest...."

Damn, he gets away with it.

Now you too have a good night.

[Time Passes]

[Time Passes]


Imagine grief as a parenthetical,
all the hours and days of mourning
contained between two punctuation
marks, all the unmet expectations,
unconsummated love affairs, condensed
to two words, compressed between
two outstretched hands, raised in pain,
cupping your head to prevent suffering
from spilling out of your eyes
in a series of unending ellipses....


This poem started out as an exercise in writing with parenthetical statements in it. I failed in that regard! My writing process is circuitous (All Rising to a great place is by a winding stair-- Francis Bacon) and often images and lines from poetry or books that I have read take center stage for a while. Sometimes I like to riff off of them or throw in obscure references to obscure quotations. (The games that some writers like to play.)

I started thinking about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse which contains a haunting section late in the book entitled "Time Passes." Don't read further if you don't want to know what happens at the end of the book, though Woolf is not the author I would read for plot. (Wow, a triple negative.) In this section, we learn of the death of many main characters through a sentence or two that are always in brackets. She is writing BIG in which themes of DARKNESS and TIME are set up against the human and the inevitable brevity of our life on Earth. Rereading the section this morning, I was blown away at the beauty of her prose.

Another parenthetical story: I first read To the Lighthouse at Yale and had borrowed my ex's copy of the book. In that edition, the section "Time Passes" had its own page upon which the ex had scrawled something like "This is the part in which Andrew Ramsey dies." Well perhaps it is true that revenge is a dish best served cold.

Mendocino

The Medocino Coast in winter. Tall redwood trees, fog and mist. A December of the soul. Hills of fern and moss. Mushrooms of all varieties appearing on the forest floor as if through spontaneous generation. And then the ocean. Seething and surging against craggy outcroppings of rock and sand. Savage in its beauty. Grand in its ferocity. Romantic with a capital R. A communion with the sublime. Ah, but when all is almost lost in the most purple of prose, the perfect sunset.

Poem for the Inauguration of the New Year

The world past autumn turns sere and skeletal,

a landscape sketched in chalk and coal, each line

a dormant branch or vine submerged in drizzle,

its flames snuffed out, a flaw in God’s design,

a smudge, a slanted rhyme, define despair

until I see a tree on fire, with jewels

of burning orange light, a vision rare--

an oxymoron nature ridicules.



The poet cloaked in black leaves oval footprints

in the snow, his face a mask of cold resolve,

a fan in his outstretched hand, bears a glint

of spring, a branch of plum blossoms absolves

the winter of its dying dream, its barren strife,

instills a newborn hope and cries, Choose life.

An Explanation

Why name a blog after a Ferris Wheel? Location, location, location. The Pacific Wheel sits at the end of the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles California, and I used to run by it once a week when I lived in LA. Its wildly blinking lights were a landmark , the half way point on my runs. I also think of it as marking the end of another type of journey as the Wheel spins at the western end of the continental US. For many years, I had tried to write a poem capturing the BIG theme of my westering journey and the place that California holds in my own twisted artistic consciousness. Finishing that poem a few years ago was a breakthrough for me. How fitting then to choose Pacific Wheel as a name for a blog that I hope will capture my idiosyncratic poetic pretensions, observations, and travels (geographically and culturally.)