Nature Table Figures: The Spring Collection

Ever since 1987, I've wanted to write for the J. Peterman Company. Whenever I write a description for an auction catalog item, J. Peterman's influence is present. I keep meaning to dig out the letter J. Peterman wrote to me in response to an impassioned plea to bring back the "Jane Austen dress," a simple but elegant gown I wanted to wear for my theoretical wedding.

Here my Spring Shade Garden Collection nature table dolls for the school auction:


Johnny Jump-Up, Wake-Robin Trillium, and Bleeding Heart

1. Johnny Jump-Up is a 5 ½ nature table figure inspired by the part-shade perennial also known as heartsease and referred to as “Love-in-idleness” by Oberon, King of the Fairies, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.* This garden jester is dressed in yellow, purple and green with a removable lined vest. He is created out of wool and cotton plus metal pipe-cleaners for the arms, legs and flower staff. He can stand without support as long as his legs are bowed. Johnny-Jump Up will bring color and joy to your early summer nature table for years provided he is kept out of reach from animals and children who still put toys in their mouths.

2.Wake-Robin Trillium is a 5 ¼ inch nature table figure inspired by the three-petal woodland perennial. Most trillium flowers are white, but Wake-Robin wears a skirt of three deep red petals complemented by three dark green leaves. A simple garland of green merino wool adorns her auburn French twist. She is created out of wool and cotton plus metal pipe-cleaners for the arms and flower staff as well as metallic embroidery threads that border the sleeves and underskirt. While you should never pick trillium from the wild without a permit, Lady Wake-Robin will gladly come indoors to grace your spring nature table. However, she should be kept out of reach from animals and children who still put toys in their mouths.

3.Bleeding Heart is a 5 ¼ inch nature table figure inspired by the heart-shaped garden perennial and created for the person who can’t get enough of the color pink. Her ball-gown is decorated with tête de boeuf, wheat-ear, chain, petal and point russe embroidery stitches. Gold metallic thread winds through her hair of many braids. She is created out of wool and cotton plus metal pipe-cleaners for the arms and flower staff. While her natural counterpart is a shade-plant, Lady Bleeding Heart does not shrink from the spotlight. However, in order to assure that she blooms for months and returns the following year, she should be kept out of reach from animals and children who still put toys in their mouths.

*That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew'd thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
--A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Scene 1

Poetry Friday: Putting the Good Things Away

Putting the Good Things Away, by Marge Piercy

In the drawer were folded fine
batiste slips embroidered with scrolls
and posies, edged with handmade
lace too good for her to wear.

Daily she put on schmatehs
fit only to wash the car
or the windows, rags
that had never been pretty

even when new: somewhere
such dresses are sold only
to women without money to waste
on themselves, on pleasure,

to women who hate their bodies,
to women whose lives close on them.
Such dresses come bleached by tears,
packed in salt like herring.

Yet she put the good things away
for the good day that must surely
come, when promises would open
like tulips their satin cups

for her to drink the sweet
sacramental wine of fulfillment....

Read the rest of the poem here

.

My grandmother on my father's side bought a blue silk kimono in case she ever had to go to the hospital. She didn't want to wear the hospital gowns, after all. My grandma tucked away the blue silk kimono, but when one of her daughters admired it so, my grandmother gave it to her. Some time after, my grandmother found a green silk kimono to wear for that day in the future when she might have to go to the hospital. Her other daughter admired it so, and thus my grandmother gave away the green kimono. My grandmother then bought a bright red kimono. She showed it to me, and told me about how she had already given away the other two kimonos. "It is indeed a lovely kimono," I said.

"You should take it then," she said.

"But what about when you go to the hospital?" I asked.

"Eh!" she said with scorn, and made me take the red kimono.

Some time after that, my grandmother did have to go to the hospital. She wore the hospital gowns. A year later, when I was in college, I ruefully sent her "Putting the Good Things Away" and my own response poem about my grandmother, written in my Women's Poetry and Performance class.

Today's Poetry Friday Roundup is at Farm School.

Poetry Friday

When I was a newbie librarian, I was ambitious about introducting poetry into my storytimes. For the poem "Someone," I turned down the lights and asked children to keep the beat by knocking on the floor. These days, I'd play the guitar and make up a simple melody for the poem. I've found that I can get away with presenting poetry when I set it to music. Now, you know my secret. It's a handy one to have if you ever need to memorize poetry.

SOMEONE

Someone came knocking
At my wee, small door;
Someone came knocking,
I'm sure - sure - sure;
I listened, I opened,
I looked to left and right,
But naught there was a-stirring
In the still dark night;
Only the busy beetle
Tap-tapping in the wall,
Only from the forest
The screech-owl's call,
Only the cricket whistling
While the dewdrops fall,
So I know not who came knocking,
At all, at all, at all.

--Walter de la Mare

Other poems I'd like to set to my own simple melodies for storytimes:

The Quangle-Wangle's Hat--Edward Lear

Ode to Common Things--Pablo Neruda (full-text poem linked via a blog called Pomegranates and Paper... oh yeah, and the "common thing" of a handbag featured is lovely indeed)

The Swing--Robert Louis Stevenson

The way I want to write:

Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind--
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--
A poem should not mean
But be.

Day of the Bat

A bat is born,
Naked and blind and pale
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him. He clings
to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping,
Soaring, somersaulting-
Her baby hangs on
underneath.
All night, in happiness,
She hunts and flies.
Her high sharp cries
Like shining needlepoints of sound
Go out into the night and
echoing back,
Tell her what they have touched.
She hears how far it is,
how big it is,
which way it's going:
She lives by hearing.
--from The Bat Poet, by Randall Jarrell, illustrated by Maurice Sendak

In college, my children's literature professor told me, "Of course you like The Bat Poet. That's a book usually only children's librarians like." The basic premise is this: a little brown bat discovers that daylight reveals a completely different, totally fascinating world. He tries to get his fellow bats to stay awake with him, but they refuse. As the bat continues to "stay up" during the day, he meets an assortment of creatures, including a chipmunk who's a great listener, and a self-absorbed mockingbird who claims to have the corner-market on the correct forms of poetry.

While the story intrigued me, it was Sendak's illustrations that catapaulted me into my fascination with bats. I like their looks, the elegant silhouettes of the different wing-spans, the way their wings are actually their hands. At one point in time, I could fill your head with all sorts of facts about bats, where they showed up in folklore, as well as their prevalence in popular culture. You could get me fuming by dismissing bats as "rabid animals that fly into your hair." Hey, there are more people bitten by rabid cats, dogs, squirrels and raccoons. Everyone thinks they're cute.

I bring this subject up now because a new non-fiction children's book about bats was published a few months ago, and I want to read it. It's called Little Lost Bat, by Sandra Markle, illustrated by Alan Marks. If you get to it before I do, let me know what you think.

By the way, in China, bats are representative of happiness and good fortune. You've probably seen some version of the five bats (Longevity, Wealth, Health, Love and a Natural Death at a Ripe Age:



I still collect folktales about bats. One of my favorite ones comes from Cote d'Ivoire. To be continued...

cockroach vs. gorilla

Lucia has been rifling through Bede's and my books, pushing them in so that they're not edged anymore, and pulling out the ones she finds interesting. I keep telling her that Plato's Republic is not age-appropriate, and that there aren't enough pictures in Andrew Lang's Pink Fairy Book to interest her, but she pays me no mind.

Yesterday, Lucia pulled off the shelf my copy of archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis. Archy is a cockroach who was a human verse libre poet in a past life, and while he still maintains his poetic sensibilities, he can only write his poems by hopping on typewriter keyboard keys. Like E.E. Cummings, Archy types in lower-case because he cannot reach the shift key. At least, that's Archy's excuse.* Mehitabel is an alley cat who claims to have had a glorious past of infamous lives. I didn't think Lucia was ready for archy and mehitabel, as some of the stories within the poems are quite harrowing. I put the book back back on the shelf and brought down Bede's tome of Curious George stories. Lucia was sated for the moment.

That evening, I found a piece of paper on the floor with the following archy poem snippet copied in green ink:

mehitabel is a believer
in the pythagorean
theory of the transmigration
of the soul and she claims
that formerly her spirit
was incarnated in the body
of cleopatra
that was a long time ago
and one must not be
surprised if mehitabel
has forgotten some of her
more regal manners

I am reminded of my tenant Brad the Gorilla, whom some might readily believe has had a vibrant history somewhere in time if not here. Many more would say that not only has Brad forgotten his more regal manners, but that he never had them to begin with. I disagree. For all that Brad is so brusque and domineering (read his blog for yourself if you don't believe me), there is something noble about a gorilla that is fluent in Latin** and specializes in cooking world cuisines. Brad is a real character. I'm not allowed to say too much about Brad's early life for fear of compromising the dignity of a (human) family member close to me, but he's accumulated enough stories to start his own blog.

----------------
*I have nothing to say in defense of E.E.Cummings, except that some of his poems make me weak in the knees.

**By all rights, I should have failed Latin. I only passed it because I wrote a seven page paper about Arion and the Dolphin, after protesting that the Latin textbook had gotten it wrong.

"Awash With Angels"

...On that same rooftop in New York, I brought up "The First Elegy," by Rainier Maria Rilke:

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying."

Bede responded with Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," by Richard Wilbur:

"The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are."