I’ve been spending Covidtide cycling as much as possible. The mental rhythm of riding is calming, contemplative. Something gets in my head and I just keep turning it over. Since June 19th it’s been Bob Dylan’s new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, released on that date.
When the May issue of Poetry dropped through my mail slot, it landed so I got to read the back cover first, lines from classicist/poet A.E. Stallings’s “Daedal”: “To build a labyrinth it takes / some good intentions, some mistakes.” Perfect, with allowances for the imperfect.
Whether I’m reading or writing, the page is a good place for me—the place where I feel most at home. Like my nightly prayer, it’s a solitary courtyard, but one with a potentially social dimension.
Chardin has always been one of my favorite painters. Now that so many of us are sequestered in our homes because of the coronavirus, his paintings seem particularly appropriate. Why?—because their subject matter is so often the stuff that surrounds us. Look at his painting “Still Life with Teapot, Grapes, Chestnuts, and a Pear” and the viewer finds exactly what its title says will be found: a teapot, grapes, chestnuts, and a pear.