Welcome to November’s Poem of the Month!
As many of you know, I recently returned from two wonderful, relaxing weeks of vacation in Portugal and Italy. This was my annual trip to Portugal with fellow Port-wine lovers for the Harvest, followed by a solo sojourn to Rome, Florence and Montorosso. I thought I’d share a few of the highlights (and a link to pictures at the end of this message) before getting to this month’s poem.
The Harvest Tour was, again, an incredible chance to visit some of the Port lodges in Porto and some Port quintas (wineries) in the Douro Valley to sample a little over 200 wines. They ranged from 1937 Colheita Ports from both Noval and Burmester and an amazing 1935 White Port, to some new “Ports” from grapes that had been literally been picked just days before. We had a wonderful group of people on the trip, as you will probably be able to tell from the photos. 🙂
After the week in Portugal, I headed east to Italy. Rome was my first stop, where I spent a few days staring in awe at the Coliseum, ruins and 2000+ years of history. There is nothing quite like strolling on Palatine Hill (which was inhabited as early as 1000 BC) and among the ruins of places like the royal palace and suddenly realizing how old the the piece of marble that you are walking is. It was dizzying to contemplating that Caesar Agustus or Domitian might have walked on that very same floor.
After Rome, I spent a few days in Florence reveling in some of the greatest Renaissance art and sculpture on the earth. Alas, none of the museums allowed photos of any kind, and descriptions could never do those works justice, but I was completely fascinating to see first hand the artistic shift during the Renaissance that transformed the art from flat, two dimensional iconic representations to more realistic three-dimensional masterpieces.
My final stop in Italy was Cinque Terre, five small towns on the rocky Mediterranean coast near Florence. The train connecting the five towns is basically one long tunnel, which emerges briefly from the rock at each of the stations. I certainly was not prepared for what I saw when the train exited the tunnel into the bright Mediterranean sunshine at Montorosso – azure blue skies, an exquisite blue sea, and the five quaint towns (all connected by the aforementioned train, a ferry boat, and a hiking trail). An afternoon swim in the sea, a hike through the five towns, and an unforgettable sunset from on outdoor cafe left me with some of my most memorable moments of the whole trip.
Now, on to the poem of the month… One of the first things I noticed when I returned to Seattle was that the leaves were beginning to change, painted in a rich palate of golds, browns, ambers and reds. It was with pleasant surprise, then, that I came across this poem last night, as it invokes a journey, the changing colors of the leaves, and a dawning awareness of nature upon returning home.
Enjoy!
Stewart
C.G. Hanzlicek
(1942 – )
Mystery
The self is no mystery, the mystery is
That there is something for us to stand on.
— George Oppen
There are no guardrails at Canyon de Chelly.
On the very edge
Of the great brow of rock,
I suffered a vertigo
That tied me forever to the earth.
I want to be here,
With the oak floors creaking under me,
And outside, among the flowers,
Where the columbine
Sensibly dies back upon itself
In the first freeze.
The mysteries are all here:
Roots, the leaves turning,
The spiders hard at their geometry lessons,
The seed that obeys perfectly
Its own limits,
The worms turning among the leaves,
Turning the leaves to compost,
Dung beetle and bottle fly,
The fluting of the white crowned sparrow,
The shrill cries
Of the flickers, newly arrived,
The dog at his dreams,
The airiness of the dogwood,
The heaviness of the cork oak,
And the Bradford pear,
Burning its deepest reds like a candle flame,
And the sun, most mysterious,
Will be almost that red
Just before setting this evening.
The muddiness of the self
Can be forgiven, almost forgotten,
In the clarity of late October.
