I was in my early twenties, new to Europe, overwhelmed by the rich variety of my experiences. Had I seen Chartres then, and wept at the way light from the great rose window shimmered the stone pillars? Possibly. Rouault’s painting remembers stained glass, its blocks of color angular as if scored, snibbed, and bordered in black lead strips. The old king’s bearded face is in profile. An arm, red robed and glowing, holds not a sceptre but a scumbled swirl of pink and white oil paint that could be a flower. The face is sad. Weary of government and pageantry, awaiting death, he contemplates the blossom’s transience.

Last fall my young apple tree was dying. A gopher had gnawed around the root ball. I pressed back the soil as best I could. A few weeks later, fruit stunted and gray leaves shriveled, one branch lifted a defiant fist of delicate pink blossom. The blossom faded. Winter came. Then miraculously this spring, the entire tree blossomed, the flowers the same color as those in the old king’s hand. Petals have fallen now, but tiny apples are forming.

I too grow old, but the cycle of life continues. In San Francisco this week, my niece gave birth to a baby girl as beautiful as apple blossom. A cause for celebration.

I glanced back at the old sandstone building behind me. In spring, the owl and its mate had nested on a fourth floor windowsill of Encina’s east wing, which had been gutted by fire in 1972, ten years earlier, and was now uninhabited by humans. We delighted in seeing the fuzzy owlets emerge from behind the broken and boarded-up window and perch precariously on the stone sill. Owl parents returned with food, such as gophers and ground squirrels. Interoffice memoranda reported on the babies’ progress in learning to fly.

That year had seen a huge increase in ground squirrels on the university grounds. We learned that the groundskeepers were laying an anti-coagulant poison to try to reduce the damage to trees and bushes. The most likely cause of the owl’s death was a poisoned rodent. Angrily, staff and students demanded that the Grounds Dept. cease using the poison.

They desisted for a while. But fourteen years later, a local newspaper, the Palo Alto Weekly, did a follow-up story. It quotes the Manager of Grounds, who “does not recall that there was a clear link between the death of the owl and ground squirrel poison. But whatever was said fourteen years ago,” the Weekly article continued, “one thing is clear. Stanford is once again controlling the ground squirrel population with poison. For nearly a year, Stanford has been killing ground squirrels by giving them food laced with an anti-coagulant, which causes the animals to internally bleed to death over several days. The program has upset campus bird watchers, many of whom remember what happened to the owl family.”

This year, I decided to follow up. I read on Stanford’s website that the university had launched an Integrated Pest Management program in 1997, the year after the Palo Alto Weekly article appeared. Since then, according to the website, “the Grounds department at Stanford has been dedicated to using an integrated pest management approach to provide suppression and long-term control of pests on campus, with the least amount of impact to the environment, non-target organisms and human health.”

Herb Fong, who was Grounds manager during the 1980s and ‘90s, is now retired, but agreed to inquire on my behalf as to the department’s current policies. Today I had excellent news. Herb writes: “I confirmed with staff that they are continuing to use trapping as the means to control the ground squirrels and no baits are used on the campus.”

If an 8,180-acre campus, mostly woods and grasslands, can stop using poisons, so can any other property whose owners care about wildlife.

LEAVING NEW ZEALAND

I am Katherine Mansfield come again

on that slow ship out of Wellington.

Taste of bile in my mouth, I endure

the airless heat of the lower decks

rank with galley smells

and the deep-throated thump of engines.

The ice-slick of my daughter’s death

stumbling my speech,

I sit with parties playing Scrabble on the deck

where Indonesian stewards in white jackets

rattle tea-trolleys.

Evenings, I watch for that streak of light

as sun plunges into viscous sea.

Then sudden dark.

Familiar stars of my Antipodes

recede southward.

In their place, carved mahogany panels

that fill the walls of staterooms and stairways:

solemn eyes of strange beasts

peer from behind carved vines,

birds in extravagant plumage

perch on the edge of my dreams.

ANOTHER STORY ABOUT LOVE

I tell him about

the story in my mother’s letter:

a girl I knew last year in high school

dead, a botched abortion,

septicemia,

the police phoning her parents,

saying Come and get your kid.

First time I’d heard the word

abortion.

I ask him what it means, hear

the silence around it,

his silence as we walk by the river

late at night

near his dorm room

rank with beer bottles

and dirty socks,

where Eartha Kitt sang for us

Birds do it, bees do it…

A wooden bench,

the slop, slop of the river.

His hand explores my thigh.

My leg closes against him,

saying no,

I don’t want to die,

not yet.

An incident based on my research for the book has stuck with me, however. The central character, a young woman newspaper reporter, works in Palo Alto, CA and goes to East Palo Alto, a black neighborhood just across the freeway, to interview a community organizer. Here are excerpts from a few paragraphs:

The afternoon was hot, and she was thankful for the shade of the overhanging trees as she drove down University Avenue toward East Palo Alto. She had never been there before. There had been nothing to go for. And she would have felt diffident about going to a black ghetto as a mere sightseer, even if it had occurred to her to do so.

As she came down the ramp on the other side of the freeway, she knew she was in a different country. The road was suddenly potholed and bumpy, and brown dust rose in thick choking swirls from its verges. She slowed and looked about her. Such tiny bedraggled houses, desperately in need of paint. Yards littered with junk, yet here and there a brave attempt at order and color. She came upon a few tatty shops. Surely this couldn’t be the main shopping center? Yet soon she could see the sign, NAIROBI SHOPPING CENTER, and underneath, in a language she could not understand, UHURU NA UMOJA.

Showing the predictable set of fears and prejudices about the African-American people she sees around her, the reporter parks her car and walks to her appointment, during which she is invited to sit in on a fair housing case.

She said goodbye, and walked slowly back to the car, past the Louisiana Soul Food Kitchen and the Black and Tan Barber. The heat and dust were almost unbearable.

Back across the freeway, she noticed for the first time the neatly swinging redwood sign: Welcome to Palo Alto. A few blocks further down University and it hit her like a punch in the gut. She pulled over to the side of the road and rested her head on the steering wheel, fighting back an impulse to vomit. The contrast was an obscenity. Huge magnolias here lined the street on both sides, giving deep dappled shade to the well-paved highway. Between the road and the white concrete sidewalks rose great greening mounds of juniper and ivy, and beyond them, with manicured lawns and discreet sprinkler systems, were the complacent mansions of the rich.

“Yeah,” I reply with a shrug of despair. She too is a gardener. She understands.

Ever since my husband and I built this house at the edge of the forest, we have tried to live in respectful community with the creatures who were here before us. Jackrabbits, foxes and bobcats use our ground-level front porch as a convenient highway. My vegetable garden is fenced off, but the resident blacktailed deer amble through the rest of the garden wherever they please. They even help by pulling juicy weeds from among the deer-resistant perennials and by keeping down the path to the compost bins more efficiently than a lawn-mower.

The only problem I have is with the bucks, who scrape off the velvet covering their antlers by rubbing them against young trees and shrubs. Already some of the cypresses show the telltale signs: a snapped-off branch or frond turning brown, a length of the trunk rubbed raw. It’s a mating signal, I understand, with several facets: the visual sign left by the buck’s rubbing, chemical signals from glands on the buck’s face, and the sound of the buck thrashing branches of the tree on which it is rubbing.  I once watched a large buck do battle with a stiff and spiny Ceonothus bush by the driveway. Again and again he attacked, as if determined to demolish it. Here on this roadbank I have lost a Pacific Wax Myrtle and a couple of Shore Pines to such opponents. The Cypresses are a replacement, to help fill in a windbreak against our fierce nor’westers. I can’t afford to lose them too.

The prison cages are unsightly, and don’t fit with the natural landscape I’d like to have. But Cypresses grow quickly; soon their foliage will hide the wire. Sometimes compromises must be made.

I was privileged to receive a copy of this handsome limited edition. Written over the past three years, the poems chronicle the poet’s recognition that her death is imminent and her determination to live each remaining day in the beauty of the moment. The poems are rich with images such as: …a tangle of branches/ peremptory against a crystal sky. She asks:

If I died tomorrow, what would

happen to the poems in my head?

Christchurch, New Zealand, where Diana lives, has suffered a series of devastating earthquakes and aftershocks that figure in many of the poems. In “Elsewhere” she writes:

…the earth where I thought

to lay my final bones

is writhing like a wounded snake.

The earthquake draws her mind outward to share a communal grief:

I mourn for the lost, the mained, the dead.

I mourn for our grieving city.

The experience of working with composer Anthony Ritchie on a song sycle of her poems draws her to a new awareness of the importance of people in her life. The final poem in the book reworks “Goodbye,” the final poem in the song cycle. Keeping the opening lines:  If this day were to be/ my last …,  she traces the trajectory of her preparations for death, from spiritual and inward-looking to a recognition of a fear in which …I relegated/ my friends to the outer suburbs. The poem ends:

If tonight were to be my very last,

I would be desolate

at leaving behind

a lifetime of friends.

I have been friends with Diana since our freshman year at the University of Canterbury, fifty-four years ago, where we met in English Literature class. During school breaks we worked as kitchen hands at the same remote fishing camp. We lived next-door to each other as young marrieds, and shared survival tips as penniless expatriate parents of small children in London. Over the years and across the globe we have stayed in touch, supporting each other as best we could in times of grief, commenting on each other’s poems, occasionally visiting. I honor this lifetime of friendship as I read AGAINST ALL ODDS.

with hand-scrawled signs,

willows thick along the stony creek,

late-summer dry.

Body flattened to the ground,

small brown curly-haired dog

wills her three sheep smoothly

through all four gates.

Oblivious to all else,

a child sits in the dirt.

His hand through the chain-link fence

caresses a miniature goat.

Scent of fresh hay,

sweetness of animal dung.

At the ice-cream stall

a tot in her father’s arms demands

a chocolate-covered cone.

Unseen by the child,

the server also hands the man

a bowl and spoon.

Slices of heirloom apple

crisply tart on the tongue.

Angora rabbit pants as she

submits to being shorn.

Her cloud of fur becomes yarn

on the spinning wheel close by.

Ferris wheel whirl and squeal,

diesel rumble, carousel tunes.

Pink-cheeked above the white and green

of her 4H uniform,

a child sets down her golden trophy,

takes her bantam cock from the cage.

It nestles in her arms.

I also had a chance to study the eggshells more closely, and realize I was mistaken in their color. They have a bluish cast, but the color is more of a creamy tan, speckled with brown blotches.