Margotlog: Three Cities in Italy and My Poem, "The Annunciation"

Margotlog: Three Cities in Italy, and My Poem "The Annunciation"

 

I just came home from la bel'Italia, specifically three cities: Orte, Arezzo, and Florence. I've never been to Orte and Arezzo before, Florence, however, many many times. As part-Italian, and an art-lover, as a happy speaker of even limited Italian, as a fan of the country's quirky history and beautiful landscapes, and ever a pasta-lover--my trips to Italy rejuvenate me and send me home after 8-10 days completely satisfied.

 

There are always snags. This time, I was at my wits end trying to procure b & b's and even a hotel at the last minute. Luckily, friends who know Orte agreed to pick me up at the train station and chug-chug me up the incredibly high wall face to the old city. They deposited me at the clean quiet B&B I'd reserved, and the second day I took a tour of the enormous city underground - miles of snaking tunnels and deep pools which once formed the city's water reservoir and delivery system. There were no desiccated bodies as in Rome's catacombs, but the sense of being in another world, with quivery light, and deep blue water satisfied some desire to try out burial ahead of time.

 

Arezzo, though also high, is not much like Orte's almost funeral quiet. Arezzo is a town of youth wearing everything from torn jeans to tiered gauzy dresses. The first evening in a rambling two-room hall, a friend held a retrospective exhibit of her lover's work. He died three years ago. They kept horses in a stone farmhouse 40 kilometers outside town. She still stables two mares and a filly-in-training for the big time. It was a time of celebration, but full of strangers and maybe on my part, too much wine.

 

It was the second day, on my own, when I truly gathered a sense of this ancient yet very lively town.

High up beside the cathedral, I sat in a very pleasant park under a rim of umbrella pines leaning together to catch the sun. Children ran across an open circle with their dark German shepherd barking after them. When he was leashed and couldn't follow, he emitted the strangest groans and gurgles I've ever heard coming from a dog. Otherwise, in the quiet, I looked into the hills studded with a few

quintessential Tuscan farmhouses, three-story, with the bronzed terracotta look of old wood, and topped by an almost flat roof that overhung the entire building, like a sheltering hat.

 

Coming down from this repose, I found myself surrounded by young men in snazzy suits, pulling and pushing one of their comrades in a bicycle three-seater. He carried a bouquet of huge zinnias. What's going on? I wondered. Following them as they braked to keep him from zipping down the steep street, I stopped with them before an ancient building renown for its collection of different columns. Then, up from the bottom of the street, chugged a VW bus. Inside sat the bride, dressed in gauzy white, with cheeks as round and firm as a ripe apple. She looked so young, almost like myself, in the photos of my first wedding, the one where I too wore a veil partly hiding my face. Lots of onlookers like myself hung around to see her slowly descend, have her veil spread around her and slowly enter the sanctuary, carrying her own bouquet of red, pink, yellow, and orange zinnias.

 

Finally Florence with my artist friend Patricia Glee Smith (look for her website). We visited the Uffizi at night, the only way to avoid the crowds. Standing before Leonardo's "Annunciation," I was happily transported to my first love affair with this painting, which coincided with falling in love with the back of a young man walking down the aisle of a Minneapolis poetry reading.

 

Now I give you the poem, published in my full-length poetry collection, Between the Houses (Laurel Poetry Collective, 2004). If you order it from Amazon and read it, please leave a comment on the Amazon page for the book. Here's the poem, perhaps the one I treasure most:

The Annunciation

In Leonardo's painting, she studies
out of doors, this eminent virgin
in her habitual cloth of red and blue.

Before her on a pedestal table
encrusted with a mollusk shell, lies
an open book from which she raises her eyes

to the boy dressed in swan's wings, wearing
a cap of curls and carrying a lily wand.
She may have seen him ahead of her

in church, his shoulders and torso
masculine and square, his hair
a tangle of innuendo.

That he comes to her in the garb
of heaven is only an accident
of myth and history, for she needs

nothing announced. The cleft in the palm
of her raised hand anticipates all he means
and she accepts only provisionally,

for he is her inspiration, not a winged
word or an unborn child. This child-man
with fabulous pinions, will cause her

to abandon the protected corner,
to crush the low, delicate plants,
and dream his weight will never rise.

Margotlog: Window Washing

Margotlog: Window Washing

It's perfect Minnesota weather for window washing--clear, crisp, low humidity, pleasant to stand outside washing a year's grim off my kitchen windows, then the front ones within the porch, then the kitchen door--all with silhouettes of falcons pasted on the glass to deter those drive-by smashers who insist on seeing their enemies in mirrors of themselves.

This rather pleasant, repetitive cleansing of grim to allow clear sight takes me back to our very earliest days in this house, bought before anyone heard of a "crash." How much did we pay? Does it matter? It was a good deal, this three-story house with a finished attic, though the two "attic" rooms (once maids' rooms, so we heard) still retained remnants of the old gas fixtures--odd fingers clothed in black tape. Needless to say we replaced them with electricity.

These would become the daughters' rooms, the blended-family daughters, so shy they barely spoke to each other at first, one choosing fleur-de-lis silver-and-blue wallpaper and pink carpeting, the other wanting shy strips of violets and beige carpet. There are plants on that third floor who had lived there the entire 30 years since we moved in--asparagus ferns, one still thriving, the other kaput, head down below the back deck.

And the daughters? As I swipe away grime, I think of these stalwart, handsome young women--well not so young as mature, competent, making their mark in the world. How we worried about them, then, blended family artifacts. Would they ever speak to each other? Would they ever outgrow the difficulty our divorces and remarriage had caused them?

At the time, I substituted joyous decorating and cooking for broken bonds. As I wipe grime off the windows, I glimpse that huge main courses my new husband and I both produced--lasagna, "hot dish"--his contribution, some concoction of noodles, mushroom soup, and hamburger. We sat awkwardly around the dining room table from his single-fellow house, actually quite a fine table with comfortable chairs. But the comfort did not extend to our blended family dinners. His son glowered, the only one of the three children who had the guts to show his true feelings. While I probably gabbled on, switching topics with lighting speed, and my husband smiled and passed the hot dish.

I have loved this house with and without children in it. Its windows face straight north and south, bringing in winter sun on north-facing windows where for years of winters, I've basked with the cats. And in summer, with windows in both directions open, we have wonderful breezes. I love the cramped second floor rooms, where I now write this message to the world. Full of plants for me except in summer when they all get time outside. But now, after our threat of freeze, the Christmas cactus have come to sit beside me, arching their awkward claws toward light, and catching the sun on their flat palm-like limbs.

Birds have become my children substitutes. I feed seed-eaters morning and evening, a ritual that sends me out in all weather, serving needs other than my own, loving the glimpses of nut-hatches eating upside down, finches swarming the sunflower seeds, and in the twilight just before dark, the cardinals with their chip, chip, chip. Beautiful, shy birds, my emissaries from the other world, the southland of my growing up, which too is folded into this house.

Margotlog: Neighborhood Round-up: On a Scale of 1-10

Margotlog: Neighborhood Roundup: On a Scale of 1-10.

It's a beautiful morning in this small part of the Upper Midwest--skies "couple-colored as a brindled cow," to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins. Brisk breezes counteract humidity. Sun dazzle makes a row of poplars wink and glow. Within a tall stand of golden glow, taller than I am, wrens and goldfinch rasp and tweet. Raising babies.

It's hard to hold onto horror on such a lovely morning. Yet here it is. The horror of a young mother's death, the agony of a young child's slow torture and final murder. One of these is rather personal. The other not.

The personal is occurring just beyond my three-generation family circle. The daughter-in-law of friends has 4th stage breast cancer. She's no more than 41 or 42. Tomorrow her parents will leave for London to visit her one last time, and help the husband, their older son, manage two grandchildren aged 2 and 4. Do we call and speak our shock and grief to the parents who used to be better friends, possibly because for several years as this young woman's breast cancer spread, and she suffered through surgeries and chemo-therapy, our friends were distracted by grief, anxiety, and fear. And by frequent visits to her and her family.

Their grief and the young woman's impending death seem particularly frightening to me this morning because I just spent a happy afternoon with my own daughter, about this young mother's age. It's a vulnerable time, late 30s, early 40s. Many come into their own, earn more, expand families. Others can be struck numb by loss, disappointment, error. It can be a time of reassessment, of taking stricter account of oneself. Of shedding destructive habits. Of making big moves. I shucked a destructive relationship and moved with my daughter into a little house with an eyebrow window. The alcohol abuse which had precipitated the break-up was curable. I was lucky. There was Al-Anon.

The other horror amid the glow of this late morning arrived via the Sunday StarTribune as a long report about a 3-year-boy whose child-care workers repeatedly reported bruises, face bites, and toward the end, a tell-tale broken arm to Minnesota's Pope County child protection agency. Tell-tale break because when adults physically abuse young children by twisting their arms or legs, the bones break in recognizable patterns. The County did nothing. Over and over, when these reports arrived, child protection workers did nothing. Or the one time they questioned the step-mother, and she denied or prevaricated, that was that. Now she is going to jail for life.

Beyond the obvious facts, what went so horribly wrong here? Over and over as I walked through this morning's beauty, the naked refusal of those employed in Pope County to protect, search, question, build a case, who "Did Nothing" made a tattoo of disgust and shock to the time of my footsteps. Why did they routinely do nothing? Why did the child care workers who saw the boy hurt over and over and took the time to report this, why did they not go to the police? Would the local police have done better? What would it have taken to rouse these officials into action? What kept them so criminally unresponsive?

I could make a case for neighborhood, and small-town connivance in shielding perpetrators through fear of "rocking the boat...we have to live with these people...who's to say these child-care people know what they're talking about?"

Yet small-town connivance was broken when the women who took care of the boy reported his bites and bruises, and finally his broken leg. Imagine a step-mother biting the face of a three-year-old. Biting his face. It makes me shudder. Poor thing, poor neglected, hurt small creature. His father evidently shielding the brutal step-mother, the child-care workers not sufficiently empowered to go to the law. And this woman rampaging over the body of a pliant boy of three.

I say Pope County needs to clean out its compliant abettors. Replace them with stern, determined experts who care nothing for community pride and connivance. Who care for innocent children. Who are determined to get to the bottom of reported abuse. Who do something until the doer of such crimes is behind bars and the hurt child, instead of being dear, might have a chance to recover.

Margotlog: Late Summer Tears

Margotlog: Late Summer Tears

You don't have to weep with me--not wrenching sobs at any rate, just a slow seep of wet, honoring the clouds of green and scimitars of swallows twittering against high blue. Mornings on the deck with black and white Julia pinned beside me, a red-splashed finch goes time and again to select sunflower seeds, while one, no two fledglings peep incessantly from the crap apple tree. Their wings flutter, the almost universal sign of baby-bird begging. Only a sudden movement startles them and they fly off together.

Maybe ten days ago, huge jay teens pined for food as their parents (hard to tell father from mother) ignored them. Now on their own, these goofy loud oafs fly in and claim the place, their head feathers not quite formed for adulthood, their wings and tails not quite adult blue with crisp black stripes. They command any perch they choose, though usually one holds back to act as sentry with a loud, "Caw, caw," or a funny "click, click, gurgle," which I can't translate. Not a danger sign, I think, but some family jay-chatter meant only for familiar ears. 

The season is tending toward its end, making these pleasures bitter-sweet. When the State Fair begins late August, it's almost always intensely hot and humid. Once when my daughter answered phones in the cow barns, I'd call her up just to hear her mushy voice, nearly drowning in her own sweat. We still have a week before the pops of fireworks begin to light up the northern sky, and I can almost hear the disk-jockeys announcing either a tune or a heifer.

And why does any of this bring on tears? Because the green fuse is almost burnt out, and I pine for the season's already fleeting beauty. The glory of lilies is over, now comes the brazen tall-as-a man sunflowers. Yet, even amid these stanch portrayals of summer, even more than in winter, when we hunker into ourselves, summer ghosts flit among the zinnias. And there I am sitting in my mother's place, mid-morning of a hot South Carolina summer's day. It's her back porch, not unlike my back deck, and there's the shade of a maple she planted after Hurricane Hugo made off with some older tree or another. Her maple was not as sky-high as mine, brushing the air with enormous billows of green, but it was full enough for lovely shade. She had jays too, and flickers, sticking their long beaks in the ground looking for grubs.

As she ate her breakfast on a tray--always the same cereal with milk and a banana--she and Cindy, the dog of her solitude, low to the ground and wire-haired gray, perused the yard happenings. It was both her love of the outdoors, her tender care of trees and flowers and hydrangeas which she turned blue by burying some metal at their roots, as well as her solitude, facing the morning alone with her big empty house at her back (mine is not empty but I forget that)--both make me tear-up.

Maybe I sense I have become her, and unlike my resistance of years gone by, I don't mind so much. In fact, I honor her for making the day and the season and the active life of her yard as important to her as life itself. For it was much of her life then. She had no husband or work, no nearby offspring to bring her out of herself. But the wider world was sufficient. Whether she wrapped up in raincoat and headscarf or wore only a thin cotton shift--she found her life in touch with the red birds and azaleas, the jays and mocking birds, the maples and sycamores, the breeze and scent of Charleston harbor way off in the distance.

When my sister or I did arrive, she talked incessantly, as if she'd saved up a thousand things to tell us. But I wasn't fooled. She was always shyer than she wanted to let on, and talk covered her joy in our visit, her need to be hostess and keep the party going. But it's not her conversation I remember, but the rapt attention to a "green thought it a green shade," that I honor. This phrase from Andrew Marvell's 17th century poem, "The Garden," captures exactly that twining of leaf and memory that brings me almost perfectly in line with her shape, years ago facing the last heat of summer.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
     

Margotlog: When Almost Nothing Happened

Margotlog: When Almost Nothing Happened

For five days I've been out of contact. Yes, the cell phone rang a few times. And I talked to my daughter who shared a room with me. But I read no newspaper, saw no TV news, checked no email. Instead I gazed at "purple mountains majesty." Looked up at enormous white pine, so tall I had to bend backwards to see their feathery tops. Morning mist clung to the mountains. A family of Canada geese climbed out of the lake and waddled across the grass.

In this yoga retreat center called Kripalu in western Massachusetts, I saw plenty of people at meals. But once I closed the door of my little cell, the quiet was profound. Almost nothing happened. Except in the novel I was writing. The books I was reading. In my dreams. 

Then we left. The drive to Logan Airport in Boston took four hours, the last in heavy rain. As my daughter drove, I chanted jump-rope rhymes--"Miss Mary Mack, Mark, Mary, all dressed in black, black, black," or "Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went downstairs to see her fellow." Almost no boys jump rope. Almost all jump-rope rhymes are about girly girls.

We tried singing show tunes, but the drive out had exhausted the charm of "the surrey with the fringe on top" and "I'm just a girl who cyan't say no." By the time we returned the rental car and found the empty check-in counter for Sun Country airlines, my intense inwardness of the past five days was eroding. I smiled at the young man who was making salads for the first time at Le Bon Pan. I studied an older daughter from India who pushed her baby sister sternly away from her mother. As the wait extended from an hour to 90 minutes to two hours, my alertness sagged. It was 6:30, 7, 7:30.

We began the long walk to the gate. I took the moving walkway, feeling more and more zombielike.  Slumping into a seat not far from the boarding gate, I noticed several TV screens suspended from the ceiling nearby. The screens were split into three -- the anchor in the middle flanked by one or two commentators. All were talking about the bombing of civilians in Gaza in retaliation for the abduction and probable death of one Israeli soldier. This had evidently broken a brief cease fire and renewed hostilities. I hadn't known there was a cease fire,

In my exhaustion, the reiteration of certain facts drilled into me: several thousand Gaza civilians killed in Israeli rocket fire over the past couple of days. Killed in homes and schools, in supposed safe areas. One Israeli soldier abducted and possibly dead against hundreds, thousands of civilians dead in Gaza. The numbers did not compute.

This extreme imbalance of suffering shocked me. I clenched my teeth. Every time the screen showed destruction in Gaza, I grew angrier. For the death of one combatant, Israel felt justified in what could only be called mass murder of innocent people.

Isn't that exactly what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust of World War II? I asked myself with a flare for dramatizing the obvious. Not so easy to state even to myself was what this implied:
about Israel. Now, looking back after 24 hours, I recognize the enormity of Israel's response. The death of one Israeli soldier prompted the bombing of thousands in retaliation. One Israeli, so precious, one Israeli death, such an enormity that it was almost impossible that enemy suffering could balance this death.

Was I witnessing arrogance? Or was it fear that without extreme retaliation, fury would rain down on Israel?  If an atrocity as my gut told me, would it go unnamed (our president's response so bland as to be despicable) because many wealthy, powerful U.S. Jews hold key positions in commerce, government, and politics? It is possible that for the first time, CNN commentators were speaking out in disgust and outrage appropriate to an enormity, while U.S. officials said almost nothing? Did that silence make us, as individuals and a country, complicit? What was behind this pretense that almost nothing had happened?

Margotlog: War in Val d'Orcia

Margotlog: War in Val D'Orcia
     According to Uncle Frankie, fighting with the American 8th Army, surviving malaria in North Africa, working their way up Italy's boot, slipping Neapolitan whores into American officers' beds, and falling in love with a New York lawyer attached to Eisenhower's central staff kept him so busy and entertained, he never felt hunger, fear or exhaustion. Let his flat-footed, weak-eyed brothers stay home and drive cab or do war work. With his perfect Neapolitan dialect, my rascally youngest uncle played World War II for all it was worth.

     Iris and Antonio Origin, deep in the hills of southern Tuscany, weren't particularly discomfited by the war either, not in the beginning. On their network of 50 farms, they worked with Tuscan farmers to refashion agricultural practices that had eroded the soil. Iris went to Rome for the birth of her second child. The city was tense, she found, as the U.S. 8th Army advanced from Sicily, and German troops retreated behind them. But the Origos were absorbed in their experiment to return 150, 000 acres of marginal Tuscan land to productivity. In their huge 15th-century manor house, La Foce, they had no trouble housing twenty refugee children from the north, bombed out of their homes. Iris started a school. She began writing a diary at night when the children slept.

    It is this diary that now has become one of the most respected accounts of life in the chaos that was Italy's disintegration. Mussolini had fallen. For a while it looked like Prime Minister Badoglio would declare Italian neutrality, but as he hesitated, Fascists took control of many towns, grimly determined to resist the Allies. With an insouciance hard to imagine, Iris and Antonio conversed with German officers, begged Fascists for leniency, urged infuriated Partisans to caution and stealth, and kept faith with their peasant co-conspirators. All buried hams and cheese. Iris buried books and beautiful objects, cloth and thread. What could not be purchased, was made over from what remained. Each affectionate connection with a combatant throbbed with shared danger and the fear of loss, yet Antonio drove through mined fields to various provincial towns to beg or consult, to advise or test the water.

     The nearer the Americans came, the more dire became their situation. German troops had flooded down from the north. Sporadic fighting among Partisans, Fascists and Germans proved constantly unpredictable. Many whom the Origos encountered they could not trust. But to show this openly was as dangerous as their uncertainty. Through most of it, these two stanch patriots of what was best in Italy struggled to maintain their composure, the health and livelihood of the farms that depended on them, and the lives of their own smaller but always growing group.

     Thinking back on this absorbing account, I am reminded of another war diary, Mary Boykin Chestnut's Diary from Dixie, her description of South Carolina during the Civil Wary. In General Sherman's march to the sea, the Battle of Charleston, the fate of plantations throughout the South Carolina low country, and the chaos of unpredictable allegiances and troop movements--Mary Chestnut kept her head held high and her pluck in hand. It's impossible to compare suffering, but the immediacy of both these diaries and the writers' intelligence, stamina, and determination to survive make them unforgettable.

     Only at the end, when the Origos and their many charges had to walk away from La Foce, with only the clothes and minimal food they could carry, only after sleeping with children on the ground, soothing their fears of constant aircraft strafing, and with almost no water to be had, only then did Iris begin to suffer acutely. Finding refuge in a tiny town, being stuffed in cellars for days as the battle raged above them--this meant that when the British and Americans finally arrived, she and all her clan greeted them with passionate relief. Yet she noted that the soldiers were a bit bored by it all, having lived through similar "liberations."

     At the end her offering to the peasants stands as testimony to what was best in conflicted country: "Resigned and laborious, they and their men folk turn back from the fresh graves and the wreckage of their homes to their accustomed daily toil. It is they who will bring the land to life again." (1947,  1984, p. 239)
 

Margotlog: Musing on Losing the Elephants

Margotlog: Musing on Losing the Elephants

     I was standing in the shadows of my kitchen, looking out into blazing summer heat. What I saw instead of backyard summer green was the death of elephants. Hundreds of them. I saw the Babar I'd loved as a child, gunned down in rampant slaughter. I saw his children nudging his prone body and his face with his huge ears, bloodied from hacked-off tusks. A wave of nausea and hatred against my tribe paralyzed me, and kept me staring from darkness into rampant sun. Eventually I turned and wrote a check to African Conservation. I had to do something from my northern state, halfway across the world, to try and save the Elephants. It was the mid-1990s, the beginning of my environmental conscience.

     It's very difficult to write about the whole-sale slaughter of one of the earth's most magnificent animals. Over the years, my outrage and sorrow have taken me toward many other gross indignities against life on earth. Dangers from pesticides and herbicides--read increased autism if one lives within a mile of most U.S. farms, read loss of one third of the nation's colonies of bees--create fear and extra efforts for my little plot of soil and beyond. Lower and lower numbers of many birds--read loss of habitat to increased population, human numbers growing at 227,000 per day. Threats against drinking water and pristine native habitats from fracking and the transport via pipelines or rail cars of oil. And then there are the extreme disasters like the British Petroleum oil rig spew that has turned some of the Gulf of Mexico into a death trap for every kind of creature from tuna fry to sea birds to dolphins, not to mention humans who try to make a living from the sea.

     It's hard to write about whole-sale slaughter because over the years, I've become deadened myself to the outrage and stupidity, the whole-sale greed and convenient ignorance of so much of the world, including many neighbors in parts of the United States. Our news comes to us piecemeal. It takes concentration and stitching together of separate facts, it takes time to let these facts percolate into reality before outrage and determination are aroused.

     Recently I saw a documentary about 1964: Mississippi Freedom Summer, commemorating that enormous sweep of mostly white young people into Mississippi to live with black people there who were denied the right to vote. What struck me was the danger, but even more how those who being denied had to overcome enormous fear and centuries of submission. It took an outside force, young blacks and whites often from the north, to help stand by them, to build up hope.

     I want to build hope that we can help save the Elephants, the bees, the endangered birds. For Elephants, many efforts have already been tried and for a time succeeded--adding rangers to the various national parks in African where most Elephants live; creating a global signatory of nations agreeing to ban the sale of ivory, supporting skilled NGO's like TRAFFIC which keep track of Elephants and what happens to them and the ivory which is so often the reason they are killed.

     As Elizabeth Kolbert's recent commentary in The New Yorker outlines (7/7/2014) the United States plus the British and Chinese have pledged large grants and the outlawing of ivory. But I think much much more needs to be done. Here are some ideas:

* Since the primary sales of ivory occur in Thailand, we need to pressure the Thai government to put real teeth into forbidding the sale of ivory products. We need to fund these efforts, and probably as important, educate school children in Thailand about the magnificent animals who are being killed to bring bracelets to Thai shops.

* Coloring books, posters, school curriculum - all about Elephants in Africa. We need to rouse children to love these big animals the way I loved Babar and his family, years ago in Charleston, South Carolina, before I even saw an elephant. We need to give rewards to those shops that proudly display "NO IVORY SALES" in their windows. We need to educate tourists against buying ivory and encourage them to protest any sale they encounter.

* We need an international, political effort, perhaps a Peace Corps for the Elephants, to educate and protect the animals and to arouse the countries where Elephants roam and ivory is sold to act in their defense.

     I want to believe this is possible. I want to believe that my monthly contributions to the World Wildlife Fund's endeavors for Elephants will make a difference. I hope you who read this will contact your legislators and urge that the US institute immediately the planned efforts to protect the elephants. I urge all of us to remain involved, submit ideas, protest and lobby. In our lifetimes, there have been astonishing environmental successes in our lifetimes - notably outlawing DDT. There can be more. As they say in the ballparks, MAKE NOISE.