Queen Anne’s Lace
An elegant name for what is often
considered a weed. Wild carrot. White flower.
It recalls a runner my mother placed
on the dining room table for holidays.
A red drop from a wine glass.
Queen Anne’s Lace
Feng Shui Bedroom
She tells me “This room is unbalanced.
Avoid placing your bed under ceiling features.
No water pictures. Get rid of clutter.
No plants, flowers, books, or electronics here.”
I lie on the bed, feeling unbalanced.
The Chinese words “feng” and “shui” translate to mean “wind” and “water,” respectively. This concept is derived from an ancient poem that talks about human life being connected and flowing with the environment around it. In the philosophy of feng shui, arranging the pieces in living spaces can create balance with the natural world, harness energy forces and establish harmony between you and the environment.
In my mind, it is connected to the Tao, which translates to mean “the way.” Taoism is the way of nature.
For those who truly follow feng shui principles, they can be used to design towns, homes, rooms, and even the desk and area where you work. The placement of ancient Chinese grave sites used this philosophy in order to bring positive chi to a grave.
For an American practitioner, it will probably mean getting rid of things.
In a Liminal Space
Not a physical space between one destination
and the next – a hallway, airport, street –
but on the precipice of something new
but not quite there yet, and so –
hesitant – gazing through a veil of uncertainty.
Revealed
Lifting the garden stepping stone, I reveal
those who burrow back to their darkness.
Grubs that eat what I carefully planted.
They do their work hidden but I
must do my work too. I’m sorry.
What is really revealed in this poem?
Disappearing
Like the chipmunk who stands perfectly still
before me thinking that he is invisible,
as a schoolboy, I thought that if
I was perfectly quiet and not reacting,
I could somehow disappear in a classroom.
He Never Learned to Swim
Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned at sea,
not yet thirty, off the coast of Italy.
He had learned political poems wouldn’t change
the world, but sailing a stormy sea,
his schooner sank. He never learned to swim.
Percy Bysshe Shelley had been living in Lerici, Italy for about four years. Leaving England, he also left his radical political poetry behind and turned to a more Romantic idealism. He was sailing home from Livorno when they encountered a storm and the boat was swamped. Percy could not swim and drowned along with the crew of three. Shelley’s badly decomposed body washed ashore at Viareggio ten days later and was identified by his clothing and a copy of Keats’s “Lamia” in a jacket pocket.
The conservative London newspaper The Courier, reported, “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.” But his friends and admirers, including his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein, set about to create a Romantic legacy for him. His body was cremated on the beach in a kind of pagan ceremony. Shelley’s heart, which had not burned, was retrieved from the pyre. Mary kept it for the rest of her life, wrapped in a copy of his poem “Adonais” which is an elegy on the death of John Keats, Here is how that poem ends:
The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the Tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
The rest of his ashes were interred at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome with a monument inscribed with the words Cor Cordium — “heart of hearts” — and lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
“Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
Writing the Day 