PILGRIMAGE XII
#66
10-11/12/13/14/15-06
THE BLOEDEL RESERVE
for Richard Brown
As an old woman, I have to ask:
What is beauty for? -- vast acres and acres
of sun-kissed woods, green fields, bird song,
large, serene, trumpeter swans, that don’t trumpet often,
the almost concealed ocean, a Japanese rock garden.
After walking across autumn meadows, through mossy woods,
what remains in the memory, the heart?
Apparently that which remained in the hearts of
the creators. Our guide, the director of what
is no longer a private garden but a
Reserve, said, as we gazed, near the end
of our visit, on a reflection pool: This
is where the creators came each evening, to
walk, to sit, to be -- near the north
edge of a black rectangle, 200 feet long,
28 feet wide. Nothing more. The water lies
10 inches below the tuft of the lawn.
It needs to be changed now, but there’s
no hurry, for once cleaned, the alders must
to be ready to drop their leaves, so
that tannins, from the leaves’ decay, by turning
the water black, will assure the diamond precision
of reflections. Water too clear causes weak reflections.
Along each side of the pool, enclosed by
a wall-like hedge, there is a 16
foot margin of pristine grass; at the north
end, there is a wood bench and, in
the twilight, the black green of the grass
as well. There is stasis, silence, the stillness
of enchantment. Beauty, serenity and, if you stand
in the right place, sky high trees, sky,
deep and black, in the pool’s depth. Silence.
After thirty years of creating the beauty
of the curving walks, the wood-softened paths,
the bridges, the almost hidden roads, the bird
sanctuary, the swans’ ponds, the rolling fields that,
in their naked greenness, remind one of crops,
abundance, of a descent into grandeur and paradise,
it was the silence, the blackness, the bleakness,
the at-strange-angles reflections of the unmoving,
unwhispering trees, beneath which the Bloedels liked to
sit at sunset, twilight, into the evening, watching
the muted, noiseless, faltering, slowly, softly fading light.
Again, an old woman asks: What is beauty
for? The silence, the awareness, the peace, vast
black-mirroredness in green lawn reflecting the sky,
reflecting human thought, reflecting tomorrow’s moments, still
blank
and, if standing very still, breathless, while the wind
doesn’t move, the steady gaze of the black
pool’s surface will silently, eventually, steadfastly reflect
eternity.
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