“I didn’t know I liked rain” (Hikmet)

I was drinking my coffee in bed and reading the last few pages of John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country (a book I loved decades ago and re-reading, loved again) when I heard soft rattling. Some wind, rain, and long canes of dog rose against the blue metal roof. Of all the roses, the full apricot Lady of Shalotts, the sweet moss roses–light pink and deep pink–the Reine de Violettes, the Zephrine Drouhins, I love these best for their open hearts, the fringe of gold. I have been in a dark place this spring but now, now, I am paying attention to everything I didn’t know I loved, or knew, but didn’t notice.

it’s 1962 March 28th
I’m sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain

I’ve been on a train from Prague to Amsterdam, one that stopped in the night at Koln and Dresden and Berlin, the noise of the carriage doors opening and closing, the creak of wheels as the engine pulled away again, and the click as I pulled down the little blind at the end of my berth. I loved the starry night, the crisp linens on my bed, the tiny shower with its brass fittings. I never knew I would love sleeping on a train so much that I did it again, from Kyiv to Chernivtsi, looking through the dark window to see old women with lamps at the villages the train paused at to take on travellers.

Yesterday, waiting for a break in the weather to swim, I finally went anyway, a light rain brushing my shoulders, the water cold, the sky turning above me in its otherworld of clouds. I don’t why I waited for so many years to swim daily in cold water, held in its generous buoyancy, the sun, when it comes, lighting pools of green so clear the tiny fish show up, glittering. I loved the way my footprints in the grey sand disappeared underwater almost as soon as I’d walked out, erased by waves, just like that. And how the hoofprints of the deer who’d come to the shore, earlier than me, to drink were imprinted deep in the sand like petroglyphs.

I didn’t know I loved the sky
cloudy or clear
the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino
in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish
I hear voices
not from the blue vault but from the yard
the guards are beating someone again

I didn’t know how much I’d love sleeping in a bunk on a freight boat in a quiet bay off East Thurlow Island and how when I woke, I saw huge jellies pulsating in the dark water just by my cabin, drawn to the navigation lights. And I didn’t know how much I’d love swimming in Bute Inlet in April, in the shadow of the Homathko icefield, the water icy and alive.

I just remembered the stars
I love them too
whether I’m floored watching them from below
or whether I’m flying at their side

I love the stars too and the blurry whistle the jays make when they want seeds, 3 or 4 or sometimes just one waiting in the Douglas fir by the sliding doors for me to notice them. The beauty of the underskin of our arbutus tree, chartreuse, soft as a child’s body, when the red bark peels away. The tiny stars of spring beauties, anchored to the earth.

Tell me what you love?

Note: the lines of poetry are from Nazim Hikmet’s “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk.