This weekend we saw the movie, “The King’s Speech,” that has been nominated for a slew of Oscars. Enjoyed it very much. Although the history was prettified (the British administration’s attitude toward Hitler was more ambivalent than shown), this did not detract from a moving story. I was only a toddler when King George VI made the famous war speech that climaxes the story, but I must have heard excerpts, the sound of the words was so familiar. My earliest memories are of the hush in our New Zealand home when the BBC news came on. First the stately chimes of Big Ben. Then the announcer’s voice, orotund and crackly over the long-distance airwaves: “This is London calling. Here is the news, read by …” Pictures in the newspapers of King George and Queen Elizabeth inspecting bomb damage in London and comforting the survivors. They were our king and queen, and we loved them too.

The story of “The King’s Speech” is of the future king’s terrible stammer, and of his relationship with the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, a World War I veteran who stayed in England after that war ended to help soldiers whose powers of speech were traumatized by their experience.

One scene hit me hard. Logue, an aspiring actor and Shakespeare enthusiast, is auditioning with a local dramatic society. Their snobbish rejection, based on his Australian accent, thrust me painfully back to the years I lived in England during the 1960s. The English class structure was rigid. My accent pigeonholed me as a colonial, a box from which I could not escape.

Whether fictional or not, the king’s loyalty to Logue the Australian, in the face of his advisors’ disapproval of the fellow’s humble origins and lack of proper credentials, endeared me further to His Majesty.

In this unseasonably gorgeous January weather, I started thinking about wildflowers. This morning I took a walk at Glass Beach to look for Blennosperma. Sure enough, they’re up. Not yet the carpet of gold,  but a few bright yellow stars dot the green of our  coastal prairie, the uplifted strip of land at the edge of the cliffs. Like many of the California wildflowers we amateur flower seekers call “little yellow jobs,” the Blennosperma flower is daisy-like and shiny. Our variety, Blennosperma nanum var. robustum,  is on the Endangered Species list. It grows only on the Glass Beach Headlands and at Point Reyes.

Glass Beach, now part of MacKerricher State Park, is a popular place to walk. There is talk of putting a cycling trail through it. Seeing those early flowers, I realize again that we’re in danger of loving this place to death. I try to be careful where I walk.

A small group meets at my house once a month to talk about poetry. We take turns to choose the topic and lead the discussion. Yesterday’s topic was haiku, a classic Japanese form. We considered the arguments about Robert Hass’s poems in recent issues of Poetry, and agreed that the small fragments quoted have to be considered in the context of the whole poem. They should not be thought of as haiku. We read translations, by Hass, Jane Hirshfield and others, of the great Japanese masters. We pondered Gary Snyder’s comment:  “I do not think we should even ‘think’ haiku in other languages and cultures. We should think brief, or short poems. [Haiku] has elements that can indeed be developed in the poetries of other languages and cultures, but not by slavish imitation. To get haiku into other languages, get to the ‘heart’ of haiku, which has something to do with Zen practice and with practiced observation—not mere counting of syllables.” We read some of Snyder’s haiku-like fragments and some of Hirshfield’s “Pebbles,” her tiny poems that she describes thus:  “A pebble … is seemingly simple, but also a bit recalcitrant: it isn’t quite completely present until it has been finished inside the reader’s reaction.”

We also talked about some of the rules of classical Japanese haiku: the “turning” that often occurs, from outward observation to inside the poet’s mind, and the use of kigo, words or phrases associated with a particular season. We decided it would be fun to come up with a set of season words that would fit the environment of the Mendocino Coast. Here’s the start of our list. We’d welcome additions.

Whales swimming south

Whales swimming north with calves

Blennosperma spreading gold over Glass Beach Headlands

High tide was at dawn. By noon, the breaking waves are far distant, and the creek on its way to the sea has cut a miniature cliff through damp sand. A reflection of sun on water ripples along the vertical face, fluted already by tiny sand-falls. As I watch, more sand avalanches skitter down to where, about half-way to the water, an undulating line with a little thickness to it, like a welted trim, defines where the vertical cliff gives way to a more gradual slope. The damp sand grains bounce off the ridged line and spread out down-slope, coming to rest at about forty degrees, their angle of repose. The scene is a microcosm of the world’s geological processes, the lifting up of land masses, the crumbling away. But what strikes me most is the beauty of it: the rippling light, the fluted cliff, the flurries of sand. I am mesmerized by pattern.

This year, Tony and I hosted a winter solstice gathering. Rain pelted down, darkness closed in. But a good fire blazed on our hearth, and a pan of Yul Glogg simmered on the stove. Friends hung wet coats on the rack in the entry hall and offered gifts: a jar of preserves, a bag of cookies, a candle. One brought a poem to read, another a copy of an article she thought I might enjoy. We visited, we ate and drank.

Around the time when the sun, if we could see it, would be dropping into the sea, Tony said a few words. We listened to the poem, Rebecca Parker’s  “Winter Solstice.” A hush surrounded her words:

“…earth hangs poised

in the crystalline darkness, and then

gracefully

tilts.

Let there be a season

when holiness is heard, and

the splendor of living is revealed.”

(The whole poem can be found on the Nancy Drew Too blog).

After our guests were gone, I read the article I had been given. It was from the December 2010 Friends Journal.  I loved the title, “A Quaker Midrash.” The author, Charles David Kleymeyer, explains that the Jewish term “midrash” is an imaginative reconstruction of missing parts of a sacred text.  He creates a narrative to account for the twelve days between the birth of Jesus and the arrival of the Magi; how it was that Mary and Joseph were able to stay in Bethlehem long enough to meet them.

As I sat with the two texts in front of me, the article and the poem, I realized that all our sacred texts are midrashim. Faced with immensity, we humans make stories to explain our overwhelm of reverence. It no longer matters that Christianity appropriated the calendar dates and customs of the Roman Saturnalia, or that the Twelve Days of Christmas derive from the timeframe of the old Norse festival of Yule. It’s immaterial whether we celebrate the birthday of the sun or of the Son. What matters is the pause, as of the sun in its path at the solstice, to remember who we are and why we are here.

An essay by Tony Hoagland in the September 2010 issue of Poetry finally clarified for me why I find some modern poetry confusing. It’s meant to be, Hoagland says. In the essay he lays out two views on the function of poetry. The first suggests that poetry constructs perspective for the reader. He cites Wallace Stevens for the alternative view: “The poem must resist the intelligence/ Almost successfully.”

“It’s the gong of recognition versus the bong of disorientation,” Hoagland says. He attributes the sense of vertigo aroused by reading poems by Stevens or John Ashbery to the complexities of modern life. “After all, our economic culture specializes in two things: surfeit and counterfeit. …Add to that our drastically increased sense of the corruption of commercial and political speech, and the instability of language—surely our resulting collective dizziness is a fundamental symptom of modern life, one to which poems naturally refer.”

When I showed the essay to my friend Jeanette Boyer, she commented: “When I was a little kid, I used to love spinning in circles, stopping, and finding the world all topsy-turvy. Now that would make me all too dizzy. Similarly, I find I prefer poetry that brings me a sense of stillnesss rather than a sense of vertigo.”

I agree with Jeanette. I’m much more attuned to poems in which the reader and the poet share a moment of recognition. At the same time, we both appreciated Hoagland’s essay for the clarification it provided.

A gloriously clear day after the first big rain of the season, and the garden calls. Where to start? I need to strike a balance between our enjoyment of beauty and the garden’s needs. The lavender still gives off its evocative scent, and its color is still purple, a gray-purple, like twilight clouds. But if I leave it much longer the stems will die off. Besides, more rain is due in a couple of days, so soon the soil will be too wet to walk on. The task has to be done today.

Even now, where to cut is a challenge. Snip too high, and each rounded bush will resemble a pincushion. Too low, below where a small gray-green pair of leaves has sprouted, and the stem will die anyway. I don’t have time to manicure each individual stem. I take a breath, grab a handful of stems, and cut.

A flotilla of coyote bush seeds sails by on the wind. Negotiating the balance between garden plantings and native vegetation on this stretch of the Mendocino Coast requires the patience and skill of a diplomat. Coyote bush was here first, and provides excellent forage for the small, seed-eating birds that flock here in the fall. Douglas fir grows here too, and Douglas iris, and blue-eyed grass. Again, a balance. The Douglas fir seedlings have to go if they are close to the house. Iris and blue-eyed grass get to stay. Coyote bush, the most prolific, I allow on the outskirts of the garden. But here where it would crowd out the lavender, no. I reach down and yank out babies from between the lavender bushes.

Just published a piece about recycling poems into prose on the Mendocino Writers Blog

Living as we do at the edge of the forest, we share space with many wild creatures, large and small. Many are familiar: the deer and jack rabbits that browse on the hill, the frogs that call from the gutter downspouts, the hummingbirds that argue over nectar-filled flowers. Occasionally, we make a new acquaintance. This week it was a large dragonfly, noticeable for a long white tail and four dark wings that wave like flags.  A little research identified it as an adult male Common Whitetail (Libellula lydia). Its diet is mosquitoes and other flying insects.  An excellent neighbor to have around.

I’ve just posted a piece  on the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference blog about working with my editor, Andrew Todhunter, on revisions to my memoir about my sister Evelyn. The draft is finished, and out once again for comments. It’s always so valuable to see one’s work through another’s eyes.

Now I’ll need to write an epilogue. Just this week we learned that the New Zealand Geographical Board has assigned the name Stokes Peak, in Evelyn’s honor, to a peak in the Kaimai Range, between Tauranga (where she was born) and the Waikato (where she lived and worked). An impressive end to the story.