Liza Gyllenhaal — a writer in the garden

The daffodil heads have shriveled. The tulips stand naked, their bright silk half-slips scattered on the ground. The lilacs are blooming now, the scent intoxicating the air, spent flowers drifting like snowflakes across the lawn (an image stolen from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem below). It’s almost cold enough to snow. Though spring keeps moving through its paces, the temperatures remain stuck in the mid-50s during the day with nighttime lows dipping dangerously close to freezing. April showers did indeed bring May flowers but have lingered well into the month, and rain seems to be a permanent fixture of the weather forecast. From the window, the garden beckons – tra la! It’s May! The lusty month of May! – but be prepared for the “chill white blast of sunshine” that Bishop so perfectly evokes in this poem on the subject.

A Cold Spring

by Elizabeth Bishop

For Jane Dewey, Maryland

Nothing is so beautiful as spring. – Hopkins

A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.

The next day
was much warmer.
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt;
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practised leaping over your fences.
The infant oak-leaves swung through the sober oak.
Song-sparrows were wound up for the summer,
and in the maple the complementary cardinal
cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,
stretching miles of green limbs from the south.
In his cap the lilacs whitened,
then one day they fell like snow.

Now, in the evening,
a new moon comes.
The hills grow softer. Tufts of long grass show
where each cow-flop lies.
The bull-frogs are sounding,
slack strings plucked by heavy thumbs.
Beneath the light, against your white front door,
the smallest moths, like Chinese fans,
flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt
over pale yellow, orange, or gray.
Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies
begin to rise:
up, then down, then up again:
lit on the ascending flight,
drifting simultaneously to the same height,
– exactly like the bubbles in champagne.
– Later on they rise much higher.
And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer
these particular glowing tributes
every evening now throughout the summer.

Photo: Anders Gyllenhaal, co-author with Beverly Gyllenhaal of A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds

In the middle of winter when the world was a silent blanket of snow, I heard someone whistling to me as I carried in firewood from the garage.  I only had to glance at the empty birdfeeder to know who it was: a black-capped chickadee, reminding me it was time for a refill. These delightfully friendly, vocal little birds are our constant companions in the winter months.  When the rest of the world lies frozen, they’re busily flitting back and forth to the feeder, or swinging through the air with acrobatic precision, or hanging upside down on the rose trellis as they crack open the sunflower seeds they favor. They move in flocks, often with other woodland birds, singing out hey, sweetie! hey, sweetie! to the world at large. They have many different calls, and their vocalizations can be remarkably sophisticated. They communicate danger with an escalating scale of alarm, starting with chick-a-dee and adding dees — chick-a-dee-dee-dee! — as the threat worsens.

We’re seeing less of them now as they begin to mate and build their nests and disappear into the canopies of green. But we’ll hear them all summer, their songs and calls blending into the larger, louder avian symphony that is music to our ears whenever we remember to stop and listen.

Chickadee
by Stanley Plumly

Margaret remembering in summer how they’d fly
into her hand, black-capped, black-masked,
bobbing one birdseed at a time—I remember
in cold Amherst how they’d fill the lonely feeder
just outside the kitchen window, especially
when the ice mixed in with snow would slap
the double glass, shake it a little, and start to sing.
One wearies of the sublime, the great deep thing,
the red-tailed kiting hawk sliding down the sky
to make the kill, the sky itself changing on its own,
depth of feeling depth of field. Margaret sitting still,
pieces of the sun falling in the shadows all around her,
while my bright chickadees are braced against the wind,
feathers fluffed, each of them so small I could wrap one
in my fist to keep it warm, alive, then suddenly gone.
All winter in the snow depths just outside you live
in separations made of glass—I’d never have
the patience to hold out my hand and wait out
a bird, regardless of how beautiful the weather.

I wanted you to know that a book I’ve been working on for many years, my first work of creative nonfiction, is about to be published.  Written under my married name Liza Bennett, Georgia & Anita tells the little-known story of the enduring friendship between Georgia O’Keeffe, America’s first great woman artist, and Anita Pollitzer, a charismatic leader of the suffragist movement.

Here’s a link to the website for the book that gives some background on the story, along with photos and paintings that, due to printing costs, weren’t able to be included in the book: https://www.georgiaandanita.com

I’ll be doing an event on Wednesday, May 7th at 6 p.m. with Ellen Feldman, the author of many acclaimed historical novels, at the New York Society Library to launch the book. If you’re in the city, it would be great if you could be there, though you can also attend remotely. Here’s a link with more information and to register: https://www.nysoclib.org/events/liza-bennett-georgia-anita-friendship-georgia-okeeffe-anita-pollitzer-ellen-feldman

There will be books for sale at the event.

I’ll be doing other events in the Berkshires in Massachusetts over the course of the summer, details to follow.

Though it’s officially astronomical spring in the Northern Hemisphere, winter isn’t budging in the Berkshires. It snowed again last night. Just a light dusting, but enough to make it clear that it’s a little too early in the game to start counting our spring chickens. Desperate for a little color, we stopped by the Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Bulb Show. The air was warm and fragrant and dense with an almost equatorial humidity. Though not large, the Fitzpatrick greenhouse was packed with enough tulips, daffodils, jonquils, grape hyacinths, and forest lilies to overwhelm the winter-deprived senses. On a dull cold windy day, we were magically transported to the height of spring’s full, riotous bloom. Here’s a poem on the subject by A. E. Stallings, who uses poetic form with such wit and dexterity.

Tulips

by A. E. Stallings

The tulips make me want to paint,
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,

Something about their burnt-out hearts,
Something about their pallid stems
Wearing decay like diadems,
Parading finishes like starts,

Something about the way they twist
As if to catch the last applause,
And drink the moment through long straws,
And how, tomorrow, they’ll be missed.

The way they’re somehow getting clearer,
The tulips make me want to see—
The tulips make the other me
(The backwards one who’s in the mirror,

The one who can’t tell left from right),
Glance now over the wrong shoulder
To watch them get a little older
And give themselves up to the light.

The snows have been arriving in waves, long rolling breakers of foam, blurring the line between earth and sky. White beasts lumber across the garden where a row of bushes had been. Trees sway and tinkle under their weight of crystal chandeliers. The forecast calls for high winds that will bring down branches and knock out power. But there’s something exhilarating about being snowbound — stranded in uncharted territory that’s both beautiful and terrifying. Waking up the other morning to a landscape magically transformed, I thought of this poem by the prolific and versatile American poet William Jay Smith whom I was privileged to meet in his later years.

Winter Morning

by William Jay Smith

All night the wind swept over the house
And through our dream
Swirling the snow up through the pines,
Ruffling the white, ice-capped clapboards,
Rattling the windows,
Rustling around and below our bed
So that we rode
Over wild water
In a white ship breasting the waves.
We rode through the night
On green, marbled
Water, and, half-waking, watched
The white, eroded peaks of icebergs
Sail past our windows;
Rode out the night in that north country,
And awoke, the house buried in snow,
Perched on a
Chill promontory, a
Giant’s tooth
In the mouth of the cold valley,
Its white tongue looped frozen around us,
The trunks of tall birches
Revealing the rib cage of a whale
Stranded by a still stream;
And saw, through the motionless baleen of their branches,
As if through time,
Light that shone
On a landscape of ivory,
A harbor of bone.

For the first time in several years, we’ve been waking up to sub-zero temperatures. It’s the kind of cold that can’t really be measured by windchill factors. Biting and mean, it feels more like some kind of outsized mythic creature– the Abominable Snowman, perhaps – marauding across the landscape, freezing locks and playing havoc with your tire pressure sensor.  It’s the kind of cold that can only be compared to the deep, snow-bound winters of childhood when, insisting on wearing your thin Christmas mittens to a sledding party, you walked home sobbing because you’d lost all feeling in your fingers.

In this poem about his childhood, the 20^th-Century American poet Robert Hayden calls the predawn cold “blueblack,” which seems exactly right – as is everything else in these 14 beautiful lines of love and regret.

Those Winter Sundays

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Ben Garver, Berkshire Eagle

We hadn’t had a good rain in weeks.  A drought was declared.  Then a severe drought, along with a burn ban. The long lovely stretch of mild weather turned ominous. Leaves rustled in the underbrush, and then were swept up in a frenzied dance by Continue reading →

Photo: Gilles Gonthier

They entertained us all summer long, chasing each other around the garden in dizzying circles.  Their high-pitched chatter drove our cat mad, taunting him as they raced back and forth outside the screen porch before Continue reading →

The Sweet Autumn clematis that festooned the trellis with small glossy leaves all summer has burst into blossom. Swarmed by bees, its tiny, star-like flowers give off a heady aroma of vanilla and clove. In another few weeks, these flowers will morph into clouds of fluffy silver seed heads. The mint and basil in the herb garden have already bolted, sending up soft Continue reading →

There’s something a little fussy and old-fashioned about phlox. The flowers, arranged like over-sized five-leaf clovers, mass into airy clusters that give off a sweet, slightly musty aroma. My phlox paniculata were already well-entrenched in our long border when we bought our place almost thirty years ago, though I didn’t pay much attention to them at the time. I still don’t for most of the summer. With the peonies and lilies in riotous blossom, it’s easy to overlook the lanky plants standing quietly in the back of the border. Until, usually around mid-July, I Continue reading →

What took me so long?  It wasn’t until early this spring that I tasted my first watermelon radish, though I imagine they’ve been around forever. Rough and earthy on the outside, inside they’re a shock of gleaming dark red. Not always solid red, but riffs on the color: rings or spirals or sprinkles of red, swirled against a field of crisp white. It’s no surprise that radishes belong to the mustard family. Though full of nutritional and Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, I noticed something strange at the bottom of our frog pond: what appeared to be two dark fish, swimming in circles. They looked like carp, each about 8 inches long. But how did they get there? Our pond is small, self-contained, and pump fed.  Could a passing bird have dropped them in?  I once saw a crane stalking around the area, but it seemed to be looking for fish, not disposing of them. As the days passed and the two fish kept circulating, I noticed the frog population seemed to be thinning out. I’ve grown to love our frogs, and I couldn’t help but worry: could the carp be eating them? “Carp have a tendency to eat almost anything,” the internet informed me, “bottom matter or even minnows, crawfish and frogs.” Continue reading →

This is the time of year when meadows in the Berkshires take on an almost otherworldly beauty. Clover, wild carrot, violets, forget-me-nots  –- overnight, drifts of wildflowers have spread across field after field. Banks of blue and white wild phlox glow along roadways and at the edge of the woods.  In the deeper shade, columbine, jack-in-the-pulpit, and Indian pipes — complex, curious-looking shapes — have sprung up out of Continue reading →