A flower sonnet, with astonishments by Timm

Columbine white-lavendar, Aquilegia

A bright, overwarm, breezy Saturday afternoon, auguries of a cold front beginning to whisper louder in the growing intensity of winds. The entire East Coast from Florida to Maine today catches the brunt of a fast-moving front, with the heaviest storm activity up in Dad’s neck of the woods. I spoke to Will a while ago who was with his wife Sarah in the hospital -– she’d been admitted yesterday with chest pains –- and he said that temps were going to tumble fast tonight. This is the business end of a storm front which dumped heavy snows on the Plains earlier in the week, a massive Edmonton armada of cold weather slamming down and across the country. Freezing temperatures are predicted to reach as far down as Mobile, Alabama tonight.

Thus winter comes.

Here in Florida, the effects will be temporary -– it’s never cold for too long here -– but very strong by our calibrations. Doesn’t look like it will crack 70 degrees all week and it will stay down in the 40s at night.

It sure doesn’t feel that way yet. I have the air conditioning on, it’s so warm. But in the past hour a migraine has been blossoming with such malice I know a big change in the weather is coming. But I’m laying low – here on the couch, college football games on TV, window next to me cracked open for Belle to lay in, laptop open in my lap. It suffices for down-time for me, a few hours of the week when I can wallow in what I love most –- reveries and daydreams somewhere between napping and chilling out. Sifting the writings, looking at Timm’s images, remembering Timm as time rows on without him. His last shore—a changeful day in April, a continent away from here-- further and further in the distance behind.

Oriental Poppy, Papaver Orientale

Like I said, Will’s wife Sarah is in the hospital after suffering chest pains yesterday morning at the high school she teaches at in New Jersey. She’s a music teacher –- an extraordinarily gifted singer (a while back she toyed with the idea of trying out for the New York opera) -- and last night was the premiere of the fall musical production she’s been overseeing. She missed it, but her phone was flooded with text messages from students who said they would perform their best. Tests so far haven’t shown anything of great concern – stress and blood and cholesterol tests all look fine – so they are right now saying it’s a case of stress-induced angina. She’ll have to slow down, exercise more, be more careful with foods, maybe take some meds for the angina—but it could have been so, so much worse. The survival chances for the sort of heart attack that killed Timm are around five percent.

Sarah is 44 – Timm’s age – the youngest adult kin of our extended family. This has been such a turbulent year in our family as well as in this country (and world, for that matter). Winter of another sort has thoroughly chilled news from the financial markets, the economy.

Beth and I have coffee in the morning, trying not to worry to much about the state of things, giving thanks for what we have, for the health of loved ones who remain, taking great comfort from the attention of our cats and the well-lived-in comforts of our home. The telephone between us on a side table, still and quiet yet ever poised to commence howling with The News from some too-close-region of our hearts.

Pink Dogwood, Cornus Florida

Two subjects seem to have fascinated Timm's camera the most: waterfalls and flowers. Of the latter there are dozens of waterfall images, careening over and down mountain faces, nooking the depths of a forest, tumbling like folded silk, diaphanous, water which is sheeted, a swaddle for the eye, comforting the viewer with this message: Yes, you are here, and aren’t you glad you made it this far?

And for flowers: well, there’s a bursting, palatial garden of them in Timm’s archives. Evidence the fat, 3” binder stuffed with hundreds of sleeves of slides of flowers, many of the pages labeled with the flower’s scientific name, all yet to be scanned by father-in-law Wade.

All of the images in this post come a shoot by Timm in 2007 from The Oregon Garden, one of his most consistent patrons in his last years. The intimacy of these photos is almost hallucinogenic to me, so lush and brilliant that they not so much linger in the lens as burn there, singular iridescent flames of beauty.

Asian Poppy/White Papaver Poppy

Timm cared enough about flowers that he learned how to take these master-class photos of them: getting within kissing distance of them -- the macro lens couldn’t have been more than inches away in some; taking numerous frames of gigantic scale (12 mg per image in raw form is really, really big); selecting out the best; and then saving the file under the flower’s proper name.

That act of finding and gazing and saving and naming is as close as we can get to the insides of the natural. It takes that measure of care and discipline to be called an artist, and Timm, for all of his difficulties of focus and attention, certainly deserves the title in lifting these flowers forever down into our gaze.

Columbine red-yellow, Aquilegia

I see flowers differently now. Small and discreet, my Timm-trained eye yet finds them wherever I look. Here in this living room, there’s a vase of orchids which Beth picked up at a garden fair a few weeks ago, fistfuls of pink-and-red roundelets high up two bamboo-tied stems; there is an assortment of small flower oils Beth has collected over the years, arranged over her writing desk next to the front door; there are the African violets in vases; there are several old books of wildflowers on the coffee table. In the garden outside, the Mexican petunias still wave their bright purple blossoms and the camellia bushes along the western side of the property are budding up, soon to unfurl their frilly pink petticoats.

Flowers are everywhere now that Timm has brought my attention so roundly to their raptures.

* * *

Ranier Maria Rilke wrote his Sonnets to Orpheus toward the end of his life, two score poems that came to him so rapidly and fully formed that he likened it more to transcription than composition. He had heard of the death of a young woman – the daughter of a close friend – and somehow the image of the beauty passing so early into death located awakened a voice in him that had been dormant for many years. Perhaps he was dimly aware of his own coming death (he died in his early 50s of leukemia).

Rilke loved roses – something about their burning presence wildly engaged his imagination – and in one of these Sonnets he lends an attention to one which is Orphic in sensing an everlasting presence in something so momentarily full. As I was thinking of Timm’s flowers this morning, that poem came back to me, and I conclude with it here. Timm had the wide-open gaze of his blue-eyed childhood when he looked, with increasing mastery, at flowers: perhaps he sensed his own maturity in that fullness of nature, healed by beauty, ready and willing to sing it all back.

Dahlia field -- Asteraceae

Sonnets to Orpheus,
second part, V

Ranier Maria Rilke

Flower-muscle that slowly opens back
the anemone to another meadow-dawn,
until her womb can feel the polyphonic
light of the sonorous heavens pouring down;

muscle of an infinite acceptance,
stretched within the silent blossom-star,
at times so overpowered with abundance
that sunset’s signal for repose is bare-

ly able to return your too far hurled-
back petals for the darkness to revive:
you, strength and purpose of how many worlds!

We violent ones remain a little longer.
Ah but when, in which of all our lives,
shall we at last be open and receivers!

-- translated Stephen Mitchell

Pink Rhododendron