Fabyan Japanese Gardens

To Be Changed

seek quiet
in a Japanese Garden

walk without sound
passing black pines

slender lavender blooms
on giant ribbed hostas

the dry stone creek bed
will rush with rain

pause at the pond
cross the moon bridge

dipping to the stone lantern’s
unmovable thick walls

arched openings for light
seeping through rice paper

at night
to change you

Moon Bridge and Lantern

A book of poems about fungi, mushrooms.

One wild mushroom is named Angel’s Wings, pure white and shell shaped.
This new book is poems dwelling on the wonder and surprise of so many kinds of mushrooms
that are found in the woods. Peretti watercolors on both covers; ink illustrations inside.
Find this book in the “Bookstore” of http://www.blurb.com

Saints

small domes of gray
they come to pray

or maybe say
what we can’t today

irrepressible mushrooms
perpetuating

New Mushrooms
Ink Drawing © Marilyn Peretti

 

Halloween

Halloween-orange peers up
from between fall leaves
and the old log ending in saw marks.
Yes, it’s October’s color.
Wearing bell-shaped caps,
these small mushrooms
brighten the woods
and my heart
with their red-orange paint,
and their bold notion of attracting
old softies like me.

A Fall Find
Watercolor © Marilyn Peretti

Colors

When we think of colors, just as colors,
we think confusion for they overwhelm
in their array, bouncing off the back of the eye
in their clothing of hues. I wanted red,
but was told red is too something—
too vivid, too bright, running too much
like blood. So I turned to yellow, since
I admire tangy lemons, and even dirtied gold
of late sunflowers, droopy in their hangovers.

Mixing them with water, in varying degrees
of course, thins the primaries into new
shades, the middles, the pales, the pinks
and baby blue. Oh yes, blues, but not
that slow poignant music of lost love;
the midnights, the cornflowers, the jay,
and the bay at midday when the sun
tells the sky to be on the water.

And swirling them together with
a paintbrush is the most fun, inventing
purple, orange, rose, teal and muddy
brown, the color we carefully avoid,
that lowdown earthy color, which reminds
us of grimy work and life’s clutter—
the contempt, the unredeemable,
unplanned, muddled life, jealousy,
and all the colorless days.

Beard’s Birdhouse in the Woods

Watercolor © Marilyn Peretti