Tainaron: Mail From Another City

Tainaron - Mail from another city

Leena Krohn

Dedication

The meadow and the honey-pattern - the first letter

The hum of the wheel - the second letter

Shimmer - the third letter

Their mother's tears - the fourth letter

The burden - the fifth letter

The seventeenth spring - the sixth letter

Burning on the mountain - the seventh letter

Their innumerable dwellings - the eighth letter

Like burying beetles - the ninth letter

The charioteer - the tenth letter

Tracks in the dust - the eleventh letter

The day of the great mogul - the twelfth letter

Proof copy - the thirteenth letter

Sand - the fourteenth letter

White noise - the fifteenth letter

The Mimic - the sixteenth letter

The great window - the seventeenth letter

The work of the surveyor - the eighteenth letter

The bystander - the nineteenth letter

King Milinda's question - the twentieth letter

Not enough - the twenty-first letter

Dayma - the twenty-second letter

The Dangler - the twenty-third letter

The Guardian of the Oddfellows - the twenty-fourth letter

The cloaked moth - the twenty-fifth letter

The gate of evening - the twenty-sixth letter

The umbellifers - the twenty-seventh letter

Date as postmark - the twenty-eighth letter

Passing bells - the twenty-ninth letter

The pupal cell of my home - the thirtieth letter

About the Author

Selected Bibliography:

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Dedication

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"You are not in a place; the place is in you."
  Angelus Silesius

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For Elias, J.H. Fabre and the house of the Queen Bees

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The meadow and the honey-pattern - the first letter

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How could I forget the spring when we walked in the University's botanical gardens; for there is such a park here in Tainaron, too, large and carefully tended. If you saw it you would be astonished, for it contains many plants that no one at home knows; even a species that flowers underground.

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But most of all I like the meadow attached to the gardens, where only wild flowers grow: cornflower, cotton thistle, toadflax, spiked speedwell. But you would be wrong if you supposed them to be ordinary flowers of the field. No, they are some kind of hybrid, supernaturally large. Many of the knapweeds are as tall as a man, and their corollas are as broad as a human face; but I have also seen flowers into which one can step as if into a sunny bower.

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It gives me pleasure to imagine that I might one day take you there, beneath the thistles. Their lovely corymbs are veiled by a downy web, which floats high above like the crowns of trees on a beach promenade.

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You would enjoy a visit to the meadow, for in Tainaron it is summer and one can look at the flowers face to face. They are as open as the day itself and the hieroglyphs of the honey-patterns are precise and clear. We gaze at them, but they gaze only at the sun, which they resemble. It is so difficult to believe, in the warmth of the day's heart - just as difficult as before the face of children - that the colour and light of which they are made are matter, and that some time, soon, this very night, their dazzle will be extinguished and will no longer be visible.

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