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Knock-Your-Socks-Off Art and Literature
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Green Womanby David Cobb
dandelion day
not the purple sweater which would clash By the time I am dressed the postman has just put another of her letters through the letter box. The many-many-eth of many from her, my Green Woman, wisest of all my correspondents. As I fiddle the pages through the slit I imagine her sealing the envelope with her tongue. Her dry hurting tongue. She would have lain, as ever, unable to leave her bed, for though she weighs little more than a swan getting up onto her feet might break a bone. Page after page, in blue pen and ink. Her opinions of things I have written. Obscure titbits of wisdom stored in her brain, such as the sex life of dandelions, which they don’t have. Her passion for the Green Man. Found out about me in a small magazine. Learned about dandelions working as a botanist. Sought out the Green Men, in the years before she became too fragile, clambering into nooks and crannies in a hundred churches between the Black Sea in a January sunrise and the purple Atlantic Ocean in a December dusk. Everywhere she took photos of them, published them in a book that opened up new ground. She carried the camera and notebooks; her husband (keeping mute so he wouldn’t derail her thoughts) marching behind her with the ladder. Her great time was before anyone started to link the Green Man image with the Great Memory or the Face of Glory. Theories she despised. It would have been about the time when I was still puzzling over Goethe’s notion, das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan— the eternal spirit of womanhood, conceived by the great German poet as the force that drove civilisation onwards.
out in the garden
love-in-a-mist tangles with forget-me-nots —A version of this haibun previously appeared in Journeys: An Anthology of International Haibun, edited by Angelee Deodhar (Nivasini Publishers, 2014); republished here by author’s permission |
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