2nd Annual Wine and Word Tasting

2^nd Annual Wine and Word Tasting at Winter's Hill Vineyard. Saturday, Feb. 11. Sample tasty morsels of poetry and prose expertly paired with fine Oregon wines. Short readings by local writers Barbara Drake, Karen McPherson, Kelly Terwilliger, Adrienne Mitchell and Amalia Gladhart served up in literary "flights" at 12:30,1:30, 2:30, and 3:30. Taste Winter's Hill wines accompanied by local cheese from Beroldingen Cheese and Full Circle Creamery. Winery open 11-5. Tasting fee, $15.  6451 Hilltop Lane, Dayton OR 97114  www.wintershilllwine.com

I'll be reading from Beyond the Islands and my novel-in-progress; our delicious blend includes translators, poets, novelists, and essayists. Please plan to join us, and spread the word to friends who might be in the area.

 

More remote, named places

Punta Delgada, Península Valdés

I've been back in Oregon for a month and a half now, more or less (the precise day count seems unimportant) and, as usually happens with completed travel, the time away and the places visited--and, sadly, the people--seem increasingly remote, a little unreal, my own personal fairytale, once upon a time I went. . .  where was that?  Was that me? 

I borrowed the phrase "remote, named places" years ago from a book by Sheldon Annis, God and Production in a Guatemalan Town (U. of Texas Press); I used it as the title for a poem, thinking about particular journeys and specific distances. I still like the idea, the combination of the remote--unreachable, far, distant, isolated--that nonetheless is named; named and thus claimed, appropriated, understood, collected, mislabeled, domesticated, pulled close: any or all of the above. Yes, the phrase is taken out of context. For poem-titling, that seems fair. More than that, no writer can anticipate what combination of four or twenty words will resonate for a given reader, or how long the echo will last.

We packed a lot of traveling into the last few weeks in Argentina. It's a huge country (there's that remote idea again) but the buses are comfortable and the timetables are set to make the most of nighttime travel on a trip of 12 or 20 hours. I came home with a fistful of plans for catch-up writing: the trip to Iguazú Falls, a destination I wrote about early in the life of this blog (Iguazú Words) as a still-imaginary place that I had never visited. It's not imaginary anymore. Peninsula Valdés (think wide-open spaces, whales, seals, aquamarine against straw against wind). Capilla del Monte, now that my in-house tech genius has rescued my picture files. Buenos Aires with sweaty, tired kids who perked up enough to appreciate the fossils in the marble banisters at the Teatro Colón.

I'll get to them, or most of them (I hope). But tonight, listening to it rain, I'm caught in the both/and, either/or of remote naming, of immediate nostalgia, of travel reimagined after the fact, at one or two or three removes.

Here's the poem, with thanks to the editors of Southern Poetry Review, where it first appeared.

Remote, Named Places

Imaginative cartographers once wrote

here there be tigers

over stretches of unbroken vegetation.

My father loves this line.

He splashes it through his drink

and into the spaghetti like a sponge

making the inconceivable, real

the incomprehensible, home

and for this we follow him into the jungle,

camp where he declares the water clear,

tie ourselves onto mountains

as though our own bodies were the heaved rock

and as our skin burns in stripes through the incomplete masking

he says again, "here there be tigers"

and we roar.

He calls directions

(there is a compass in his head)

and we follow--"step here and there and there"--

the names of each destination

rolling in the pocket like a charm on a bracelet

plump knoll of silver at your wrist

and at night as the fire hisses

we lay them at his feet like rags

washing our frustration

but also trophies, marking the glow

of the last flame before he kicks it out,

marking the sole star we try to photograph and miss,

marking the sunrise we watch from our tent door, 

still cased in the down where we sleep.

We tread the short-cut like dancers

who believe the high wire is the shortest path between two points

but when we demand an explanation for delay

he mutters that the cut gets shorter later on.

My father's shoulders are thick, front to back,

and a child's head can rest without overlap, 

wind fully blocked as by a wall. On the trail

he eats from small plastic cups, horizons 

almost hidden in the lines of his hand

but at home, the maps torn and dirtied on the floor

he toasts the geographers

as the crystal sings in his grip like fire.

Puzzling

I do two or three jigsaw puzzles a year: one in January when we go to the coast for a weekend with my parents and my brother and his family, and another one (maybe two) over winter break or during the summer. This break, I've been putting together a 1000-piece puzzle of the Mona Lisa.   

I don't usually buy "great art" puzzles--I tend more toward landscapes or, honoring my children's interests, marine life--but my husband bought several at a bookstore liquidation last summer, and my son lured me in with the siren song of parent-child collaboration. Of course, my collaborator is long gone, and the card table has been commandeered for an epic game of Talisman, so my puzzle--on its floppily recycled corrugated board--has been relegated to the family room floor, where I hunker over it obsessively, inviting paralysis, or at least a bad back. 

I enjoy the momentary triumphs (ha! the hairline is complete!), the undisciplined  hum of just-one-more-piece-and-then-I'll-quit, the time to muse. 

Spread across five or six small pieces, the famous smile is indeed enigmatic. It took a while even to identify the partial, blurry curves as lips. The puzzle also has a higher than average incidence of false positives--those pieces that definitely fit, until you realize they don't. Pieces that seem to fit for a long time, throwing the rest of the project off.

It's completely cheesy to commune with great art through a cardboard puzzle mass produced in China, sold for cheap by a failing bookstore, stored on a shelf cluttered with board games and kids' books and weird crafts sets no one will admit to having purchased or requested. But I do find myself thinking about that smile, and the blend of colors, and the expression in her eyes. And the aged, cracked paint, reproduced here as a network of tiny amber lines or smears that interweave and distort and return. Brand new and glossy in all its antique fragility--memory and stories and play-time, oh my!

What would Leonardo think? What would any of them think, the composers whose most famous concertos litter the universe of ringtones and commercial jingles, the painters sold and resold on umbrellas and coffee mugs? I imagine a dialogue or perhaps a debate (like the dreadful film we watched in AP history, with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton reanimated off marble slabs to declaim the Federalist Papers) between two much-marketed artists on the merits of this particular flavor of immortality. Is it always better to be remembered? Sitting in a café in Mendoza in November, the kids and I had worked out half a story along those lines, the composer back to life and hearing his music in the oddest places, distorted, digitized but, hey, still audible.

When I was in Rosario, one of my treats was the Sunday free showing at Cine el Cairo, a public theater that offered Argentine films to an enthusiastic, all ages crowd on Sunday afternoons. I wasn't able to go that often--weekend trips began to intervene--but one of the films I saw was Rompecabezas, a film about a woman who discovers she has a gift for jigsaw puzzles. It's what's often called a "quiet" film; I found it absorbing. None of my local acquaintances had heard of it, so I also had the pleasure of seeming to be in the know as I described it to them. The protagonist's choice at the end wasn't entirely clear, but I've kept thinking about her, and the way the patient organization of fragmented images--the puzzle-building process--was reflected in the structure of the film. 

The movements of her hands, the way she surveyed the jumble of pieces as she began a puzzle and then arranged and understood them, also seems an apt representation of the way one might organize a story. In particular, I like the tactile sense of those pieces--weighed, removed, shifted, stacked. The way a story might be built, as if with lumber or stone. Or bits of cardboard.

Solstice Moon

I got up at 6:15 this morning, a dark Northwest winter morning heading for the solstice, and the moonlight across the back deck was so bright, I thought the neighbors' porch light was on. I opened the door to look, I called my daughter so she could look, too. It was read-by moonlight, and if it hadn't been so cold, I might have taken the paper outside.

The last bright, bright patch of moonlight I enjoyed was late at night, camped in a high desert oasis last summer, light so bright that, yes, we woke the children, scampered around the sagebrush, watched, awed, as the moon rose above the cliffs that defined our narrow canyon. 

No, that wasn't it--we kept our son up later than he wanted, because we were watching the moon rise, and rise; finally the poor kid surrendered and just went to bed.

This morning it's cold, below freezing (and it doesn't freeze that often here) but entirely dark except for the moonlight, which makes it feel late, not early. Time to go back to bed, not brew a cup of tea. Time for the year to flip and the days to start getting longer again. 

Until the middle of last week, I was enjoying sunshine, warm breezes; some days, I was whining about the heat and humidity. It was getting dark around eight o'clock--dark quickly, no long twilight. We watched the sun rise over the Atlantic at 5:30 or so.

We're home now, straight into a cold snap. All week, even as the jet lag has faded, I 've had the feeling of "late" in the evening. It's four or five o'clock and I'll be feeling like the day must be pretty well over, whatever I'm likely to accomplish has been completed and isn't it time for bed? Even the days I wasn't asleep on my feet well before bedtime, it still felt late.

And this morning, it doesn't quite feel early, even though the first pre-sunrise glow is visible opposite the moon. The stars are still out. It's too cold to stand barefoot on the deck very long (which is why I run inside to write) but it feels like a kind of bounty, so much illumination at once: fresh, reflected, returning, unexpected.

Bridges real, imagined, or ruined.

Parque Provincial Aconcagua

Plaza España, Mendoza

We rode the overnight bus back to Rosario from Mendoza last night, luxuriating in coche came comfort--except that my legs are a little short to take full advantage of the footrest. Dozing off, I composed a brilliant blog post in my head. What follows may or may not resemble that ur-post, that gem of observation and clever phrasing, that witty repast for the hungry soul (dinner on the bus was especially bad, and the more disappointing because Thursday night's bus dinner was quite tasty). 

Open-air lending library in the Plaza España

Mendoza's streets are wide, the sidewalks are wide, the trees are abundant. The sycamore bark seems to dapple its own shade into sunlight, or else the other way around. In any event, the effect is restful and we drank it up, along with a bit of the local wine. Not too much, though. Our first wine tasting attempt involved bright orange rental bikes and a couple of kids anxious to take to the road after weeks of city living. Mine are not city kids. So we sacrificed winery tours for the open road (more sycamores, poplars, bougainvillea blooming over doorways, the requisite acres of vines and olive groves) finally ending up at a kind of beer garden. It took some getting to (always, if the signs and friendly locals could be believed, just 300 meters further on), bumping down an unlikely gravel drive to reach a blond-log compound equipped with mismatched chairs and tables, friendly staff, decent craft beer--no wine in sight--and a loose alterna-vibe. 

Surviving chapel, ruined hotel

On Sunday, we went into the mountains. I'm used to the Andes further north, but these slopes were steeper, less green, more variegated in their reds and yellows and browns. We had some snow, just enough to make us shiver and stomp, and the clouds blocked the views of Aconcagua we'd been hoping to admire. But it was worth the trip. I've avoided organized tours, yet I enjoyed the lines of white mini-buses (small, medium, large) carting all of us around, and the sellers of crafts and snake-oil and healing rocks, and the chance to see the jumping off point for a climb my father made almost fifty years ago. He urged us, via email, to enjoy the hot baths and afternoon tea at the hotel at Puente del Inca, but the hotel is no more, lost to a slide only a year or so after Dad was there. The hot springs are now off limits, too, so as to preserve tourists from mishap and protect the natural bridge, adorned as it is (still naturally) in its orange and green mineral wash, drip by dribble by year. 

Puente Picheuta (late c. XVIII)

Andean quartz, so that health
will not be lacking in your home

 It was all natural and unnatural at once. Centuries of ruins beside the road--Inca tambos, colonial-era stone shelters, disused railroad tracks with cracking avalanche sheds falling down around them, beautifully preserved bridges from the late 1700s and from 1905. A routine itinerary with stops for photo-ops and hot chocolate, vulnerable all the same to weather and rerouting. Or revision. I don't know if any of this is what I meant to write. 

In search of lost pictures

A mysterious tech glitch having eaten a quantity of pictures off my memory card, I have tried to reconstruct what it was I saw, what I thought I wanted to remember. Snapping quick photos as a memory aid, it's easy not to look carefully enough; many of the plants are lost to me now, vague sketches of color that I recall wanting to be able to look at again. (Wasn't that Plato's warning about writing--it would make the mind lazy?) But I've salvaged a few frames:

A bright yellow orchid growing on a tree in a dusty paddock, admired just after we'd been horseback riding; we were waiting for our guide to unsaddle the horses. Bright, bright, unvariegated yellow, the flowers shaped like fans, the scalloped curve hanging downward, maybe dots of red at the base of the fan, and the flowers (they're not petals, are they?) jumbled and overlapping. The guide said it grew only on that particular tree, and that people stole chunks of it from time to time. 

In the same paddock, an old red and white Chevrolet tailgate lying in the dust, faded toward pink, placed as a shallow water trough for the horses to drink from. The white quartz gravel of the road and the golden six o'clock light on the hills behind us.

Neat vacation homes on narrow lots flush against garbage heaps (residue of the last strike) and piles of brick- in-progress. Libros Moby Dick, a bookstore in Capilla del Monte; vultures and the more attractive Caranchos with their black caps or crests gathered around a dead cow.

My mother and my two kids high up on a granite boulder in another canyon, one that used to be called El cajón and is now called Paraíso, the river dammed above to make a reservoir initially intended for recreation purposes but now, after a three-year drought, providing crucial water to the area. Box canyon becomes Eden, with a water release at the base of the dam, a metal wheel like a ship's wheel and tall water sprays arcing off like spokes at intervals. Round boulders against sharper edges, common green parrots flying over the trees, a small rodent like a guinea pig across the stream from me, and water plants, deep green and red-veined, just under the surface in a cove of the creek.

But then, too, there are the pictures I never tried to take, because the car was moving fast: kilometer after kilometer of old stone walls crisscrossing the hillsides in the Sierra de Córdoba, supplemented now by barbed wire along the highway, but still standing, keeping cattle in or out of pastures. Up close, those pastures looked to hold enough rocks to rebuild all the walls twice over with material to spare. 

Borders, Boundaries, Aerial Photographs

Not having taken any such, I wrote a poem once called "Aerial Photograph." Years ago, but I still like the poem. Here it is, with several aerial photographs of a quite different landscape: the Andes at the border between Argentina and Chile, taken on a flight from Buenos Aires to Guayaquil. I was irritated when the pilot came over the loudspeaker to announce the border, waking me up (I had been up all night).  And then I was fascinated by the dry, wrinkled, not-quite-snow-covered mountains, the suggestion of roads, the possibility of habitation, but maybe not. What do the poem and the photos have to do with each other? Not much, maybe, beyond a preoccupation with landscape, and how it belongs to us, or doesn't. Or a fascination with naming, with the ways we try to fit words to the world around us, adjusting pronunciation, spelling, understanding, until we achieve some kind of congruence.

Aerial Photograph

Skin scratched red by thistles

the old orchard brush now

interpolated from an aerial map:  trees spaced so

must have been set on purpose.

The way a home site is suddenly

four survey markers and a view,

these trees bear no more fruit than elderberries

road-dusted and dripping off the stems

impossible to harvest. Ranks of purple cones

spread half a mile beyond the feeder,

that seed hung out for finches

and the orchard sinking further

into the hillside.  

Trailers and small sheds

are easily distinguished, even in the grain

of prints distilled for public use.

It's easy to count incursions, stumps

that shouldn't have been cut.

Ella's place, Bauker Hill--

old boundary names that took,

the lilac hedge patched Forest,

a flowering almond in the old front yard

really one blossomed twig against the pale shrub.

Here lives the uncle from Stober,

my grandmother says,

syntax so openly transposed

I want not to notice, or want to boast 

the proof my high school German offers--

this is where her accent lies,

not in the vowels but in the prepositions.

Or the fences. Dark indentations 

where water gathers, wire 

crossing otherwise unbroken woods--one side

is ours, and on hands and knees we grope

under rain and through a mesh

we didn't think to find. The posts

are far too new, fast question

following immediate suspicion,                                         

furtive occupation, a sliding of green

weather-treated steel a few feet south.

Like the map of certain states

shaped like limbs or articles of clothing

you can't see this place but from the air

or from a tree. Not the slow 

hazelnuts, long past production,

but from a taller fir, or the oak 

below the fence line. Like a branch 

grafted to an older trunk

this place is only what we call it.