Ann Leary, author of The Good House » sunflowers

Come to Me

Ann Leary — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:27:10 +0000

Photo by Moses Pendleton

I believe I’ve posted this photo before, but the blog has been looking a little drab lately, so here it is again. I know. I know.

I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to post a new blog entry each day, these past few weeks. I’ve been a little busy. It actually makes me uneasy all day, if I haven’t posted a blog. I would say that it makes me feel as if I left my bed unmade, but in fact, leaving my bed unmade doesn’t make me uneasy at all. I do it all the time. But I will try to blog each day, even if it’s short.

I recently came across this baby photo of Miss Holly:

Look at her now. Six months old tomorrow.:

Still a wee mite.

And I’ve been spending some time in a barn on a hill, watching dancers audition for Momix. Such a perfect way to spend an afternoon, surrounded by these beautiful young men and women who have trekked up from the city to audition. I love watching Moses and Cynthia constantly collaborate and improvise with the dancers, even in this, the auditioning process. I’m going to write about it later, but I always enter that barn a little strung-out from writing, and when I leave, I’m filled with a sort of joyous energy. I can’t believe I lived here for so many years without knowing what Moses and Cynthia were up to. So strange to think that I drove past that old barn, day after day, unaware that inside it was just pulsing with music and electric energy – that people were challenging the boundaries of gravity and space and seemingly defying the biomechanical limitations of the human form, just to create beautiful images and narratives with their bodies. Just for beauty.

Imagine cultivating beauty for a living every day.

And here’s a poem. Ever since I switched to new blog format, I can’t copy text without it looking different from the rest of blog.

EROTIC ENERGY

by Chase Twichell

Don't tell me we're not like plants,
sending out a shoot when we need to,
or spikes, poisonous oils, or flowers.

Come to me but only when I say,
that's how plants announce

the rules of propagation.
Even children know this. You can
see them imitating all the moves

with their bright plastic toys.
So that, years later, at the moment

the girl's body finally says yes
to the end of childhood,
a green pail with an orange shovel

will appear in her mind like a tropical
blossom she has never seen before.

Twelve-Fingered, Out Of Mind

Ann Leary — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:45:17 +0000

Photo by Moses Pendleton

HER KIND, by Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Wireless Ghost

Ann Leary — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:42:04 +0000

Photo by Moses Pendleton

I’ve tried all morning to post a poem that is perfect with this photo. I cannot. It will not cut and paste the right way, but instead, jumbles all the words into lines that are not at all the the way the poet wrote/published them. I really think the internet is haunted when it comes into my house. I’m taking my computer to the coffee shop with the wireless service later this morning, and I bet I’ll have no problem.

Meanwhile, there was a very interesting piece in the Washington Post yesterday, about a former U.S. Marine. He suffered, greatly from PTSD after his experiences in Afghanistan, drinking excessively, unable to sleep. According to this piece:

“What finally began to bring him back, he said, was a television show — “Rescue Me” on the FX cable network — about a fictional New York firefighter who descended into “survivor guilt” and alcoholism after losing his best friend in the World Trade Center attacks.”

Wow.

It seems Wireless Ghost is pleased with the Washington Post piece and has allowed me to attach a link.

A Tyrant Spell Has Bound Me

Ann Leary — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:47:22 +0000

Photo by Moses Pendleton

Yes, time for a fresh dose of Moses. I’m not sure if I’ve shared this here, but Moses has tens of thousands of photographs of his sunflowers. He also has thousands of hours of video footage of them. You wouldn’t think that something as static and motionless as a row of plants would make for interesting video footage. I’ll just say that his sunflowers don’t stand still when Moses is in their midst. You wouldn’t believe the energy in those fields when he is there.

I think this photo is my favorite sunflower photo so far. No, okay, this is my favorite, but the one above ranks a close second. That’s actually Cynthia Quinn, Moses’ partner and collaborator on the left. She’s so petite, and the sunflower so large, that at first I thought that perhaps Moses had dressed up another sunflower as the grim reaper. The photo doesn’t do the beautiful Cynthia justice. This is what she really looks like:

I lifted the Cynthia photos from the web and couldn’t find the name of a photographer to credit. Sorry, amazing photographer.

Anyway, here’s a spooky poem to go with the spooky photo. I really love October in New England.

Spellbound
by Emily Brontë
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing dear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.

A Lord of Nature, Weeping

Ann Leary — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:06:02 +0000

I stopped at my friends Moses and Cynthia’s house yesterday, and Moses brought me to his sunflower garden and cut me some flowers. You need a man to cut certain sunflowers. I can’t see Martha Stewart delicately clipping this monstrous beauty from its stem:

Moses approached the eight-foot-tall stalk of the sunflower until his body almost touched it. He placed his knife’s blade against the curved stem just under the bowed head and then, turning his face away (he couldn’t look, it seemed) he lopped the thing off at the neck. Then, after gazing down at its face for a moment, he handed it to me carefully. I was astonished at its weight.

This is Moses’ hard time. He’s sowed and nurtured and protected these acres of sunflowers for a lifetime (four months for the average sunflower), but now the nights are getting cold and their days are numbered. It was quite amazing, yesterday, under a darkening sky, with the trees all skeletal now and the air crisp and chilly, to see these brilliant yellow blooms still aglow. The leaves under our feet crackled, dead and dry.

Moses cut me some more and helped me put them in my car. The sunflowers stalk pictured below was so tall that it had to ride in the passenger seat next to me, the bottom of its stem on the floor, the top blossoms grazing the roof. I had to cut it down to make it stand in the vase:

It’s not a long drive from the sunflower farm to my house, but halfway home, I became aware of a strange music. It was all around me. I looked up and saw that a bee was humming and bouncing against the roof of the car. Another – no two, actually three – were buzzing around my windshield.There was one on my leg.I was driving.I could hear that at least one was bouncing against my rear window. I was carpooling bees. I opened the windows and drove really fast, hoping they’d be sucked out by the wind. They were not. I stopped the car and jumped out and tried to swat them out with a shoe. Moses got to see, yesterday, that my car is filled with shoes. Sometime I’ll show you all the inside of my car. It’s nice to have a car full of shoes when you have a car full of bees. Well, I got one or two to leave, but then had to drive home. I turned on the AC, as I know that bees get sluggish when they’re cold. These bees were not really looking to sting me, I just had to be careful to not accidentally touch one.

Finally we arrived home, and, soon after I entered the house, I noticed the dogs leaping into the air and snapping at something. I knew it was bees. The dogs have all been stung biting bees, but they still try to bite them.

Before too terribly long, all bees were swatted out of the house and the flowers were arranged. I love the color of this blossom:

And this:

And these tall stalks look nice against the window, their round, fuzzy heads peering out:

And here’s a poem for Moses and for those who have shared this week about their dark times, which I hope, have now passed. I know some of you hate poems. Try reading this one out loud. You’ll feel the poem in a different way.

In A Dark Time
by Theodore Roethke
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood–
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks–is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is–
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

A Bright Rainy Evening

admin — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:23:55 +0000

Last night I attended a benefit for the Susan B. Anthony Project. It was held at the home of Moses Pendleton and Cynthia Quinn.

When I arrived, I saw that Moses and Cynthia had decorated their porch with many of his sunflowers:

I decided to try out one of the rocking chairs. Remind me to put on some makeup the next time I go out.

There were sunflowers everywhere, and even though it was a gray and drizzly evening, the whole porch was bright with the flowers’ yellow brilliance:

Moses carefully selected each one from his giant sunflower crop. At first glance, this just appeared to be a sunflower in a vase. Then Moses showed me how he had found it just as it was starting to open its petals. It appeared to be winking, which delighted him (and me too):

There was a small bonfire down in the lower garden:

I noticed that the women at the party, young and old, seemed to be drawn to the flames like moths. I guess it was just the heat they were drawn to. Or, possibly, the gorgeous Momix dancers who were fanning the flames:

The rows of dead plants behind the dancers are part of the marigold garden that usually looks like the suns rays. This is how it looked last year:

But this year, it was hit by what Moses desribed as a “perfect storm” of doom – damp, cold and some sort of fungus, which killed the light of the rays, but not Moses’ determination. He has a plan to combat the fungus blight with … well, I better not say, lest the local fire marshall happens upon my blog.
Here’s Cynthia, the hostess, looking like a sunny flower herself:

And another flowery friend:

The guests all gathered on the porch and the stairs to watch the Momix dancers perform:

And the show began:

I was afraid the flash from my camera was bothering those around me so I stopped taking photos. Maybe Moses will send me some. I somehow didn’t get a photo of Moses, but here’s one I took on another visit:

Well, it was a great night and for a great cause. The Susan B. Anthony house provides shelter and support for battered women, and their director, last evening told me that Moses and Cynthia have been longtime supporters of their wonderful program. Send Susan B. Anthony a donation, if you feel so inclined, or send a donation to a program for victims of domestic violence near you.

Cuttings

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:20:28 +0000

My friend Moses is harvesting some of his sunflower crop now. He sent me this photo. It’s his hand and a sunflower, through a glass table:

I always think of Theodore Roethke poems when I see Moses’ photos. Roethke’s father owned a nursery in Michigan and Roethke spent his childhood in the greenhouses, messing around with worms and roots and loam and many of his poems are about plants. I have two poems that I like for this photo. The first is the second of two poems called cuttings. The imagery is a little sexy, but I think you all can take it.
CUTTINGS (later)
Theodore Roethke
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it, -
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath wet.
Well, I warned you. But the image in the photo has an underwater feel to it so I’m adding another poem. Tell me which you think goes better with the photo.
RIVER INCIDENT
Theodore Roethke
A shell arched under my toes,
Stirred up a whirl of silt
That riffled around my knees.
Whatever I owed to time
Slowed in human form;
Sea water stood in my veins,
The elements I kept warm
Crumbled and flowed away,
And I knew I had been there before,
In that cold granitic slime,
In the dark, in the rolling water.
Okay, that last poem didn’t really go with the image at all, but I’m anxious, and it suits my mood.

Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty

admin — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:32:40 +0000

Photo by Moses Pendleton

On Thursday, as many of you know, I was in a bit of a funk about the condition of my house. It’s just that I was away for much of the summer and then, when I returned, I saw all the work that needs to be done. When you live in a house everyday, you don’t see the clutter. Or at least I don’t. So, I was sort of spinning wheels, moving piles of books from one place to another, muddling over whether or not to keep a pair of old tights or throw them away, when I got a call from the Pendleton-Quinn household. Would I like to come over for tea? There was something so wonderful and childishly rebellious about running outside when I was supposed to be cleaning my room – running off to play with my friends. Well, it was a beautiful, beautiful afternoon, too nice a day to be doing housework!

When I arrived at their house, Cynthia and Moses were standing on their wide wrap-around Victorian porch, looking out at the light. The natural afternoon light. They are planning an event that will take place in their backyard in two weeks. It’s a fundraiser for the Susan B. Anthony Project – an area organization that provides shelter and counseling for battered women. They’re having a cocktail party/dance performance with their dance company Momix and they needed to decide where the dancers would perform, where the people would watch, etc. It was the exact time in the afternoon that the performance would take place and they wanted my opinion on some of the decisions regarding these matters. I was so wildly flattered that they wanted my advice, that I only scolded them a few dozen times about the fact that they hadn’t invited me to the party.

“It’s a fundraiser – people bid on it at an auction,” they replied.

“Well, okay, I’m coming, if you insist,” I said.

After we had discussed the party and admired Moses’ garden, we all decided to ride bikes over to the farm where Moses leases land to grow his beloved sunflowers. The ride over to the farm was so bucolic and scenic. Moses and Cynthia only live ten minutes from me, but if felt like I was in another world. We arrived at the farm and there were fields of sunflowers all around us. Moses has rows and rows, acres and acres of sunflowers. He tends to them all day, everyday, during their growing season. He uses them as inspiration for his choreography, most recently in his show, Botanica, but mostly, he just cares for them because it’s his calling. He loves his sunflowers like children. He grows them for the pleasure of watching them grow. He’s a true artist in that he works to create beauty – for beauty’s sake. Not for profit or show. Just to create and nurture and photograph and admire beauty.

Photo by Moses Pendleton

When we arrived, the sun was settling low on the fields and it provided a wonderful backlighting to the flocks of brilliant flowers that surrounded us. You notice the light, when you’re with Moses. The light, the delicate fuzz on the stalk of a sunflower; the way an opening blossom looks like the crowning of a baby’s head during birth; the way that a sunflower has shimmering hues of purple and green in its center; the way that the surrounding wheat grass has a golden, hazy crown on the top of its stalk.

There were several different stands of sunflowers. Moses had them separated by types. We walked up to a patch of sunflowers that were all about eye-level with me. There was something girlish and adolescent about their stature. They were slender and of a type that doesn’t grow into the towering one-eyed monsters of the mammoth variety. These dainty sunflowers all faced the same direction, oddly, away from the sun, and Moses positioned me in front of them and I got to have the experience of having all eyes on me, they way he does each day. It felt like they were waiting for me to offer them something – like I was their sun, and since I was facing them, and the setting sun, my face was warm, and… well … it was really something.

I told Moses that I thought that sunflowers followed the sun during the day, that their big, brilliant heads always faced the sun. Moses explained that during most of their growth, they do that, but when they reach maturity, they stop following the sun. In the morning, they may be facing it, but in the evening, they keep it on their backs. They are their own sun now. Their heads are so heavy and full of pollen and seeds, they don’t need any more sustenance. They’re sort of like people, in their middle years, I thought, as Moses, Cynthia and I pedaled off on our bikes. At a certain age, you become saturated with the knowledge that comes from a lifetime of alternating darkness and light, until one day, you’re just your own source of light. Your own sun.

We rode home in the dusk, we three, past fields of hay, and darkening woods. We were home before dark, and then, I went back to cleaning my room.

Photo by Moses Pendleton

I’m Golden

admin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:03:17 +0000

Well, I am very pleased to announce that I have been dubbed “Miss Sunflower 2008.” Yes, this photo that Moses Pendleton took of me last year has been superimposed onto a sunflower somehow and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more flattering likeness. I love having stamen all over my face – it really becomes me.

Marigolds

Ann Leary — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 23:07:13 +0000

I just received an email from Phil Holland, who went to Bennington with me, though somehow I didn’t know him. Phil is a good friend of Moses Pendleton. He saw my previous post and sent me the photo above, The photo was taken from the roof of the house. Those are large Adirondack chairs in the center of the circle so that will give you an idea of the scale of the garden. The sunflowers are in the foreground. From this perspective it looks like something from Chariots of the Gods.

Yesterday Moses read me a poem written by Mr. Holland about a storm on September 11, 2002. I recalled the storm vividly when Moses read it. It was a beautiful, clear day, the first anniversary of the attacks, and in the middle of the memorial service in NY, this storm blew in out of nowhere. Up here in CT, the wind was so intense that trees were uprooted. Anyway, Moses said he told Phil Holland about the storm and then Phil whipped up this poem, but the poem was so beautiful and the imagery was so detailed and evocative that I actually suspected that perhaps Moses had written it himself and that he used the name Phil Holland when he wrote stuff! So now I know that Phil Holland lives! He lives in Greece, not in Moses’s mind!