Four-legged mouse leaves artful comb-lines in this cold dry snow; its tail a crisp fifth line; narrow-gauge tracks running into and out of snowcapped rock hollows, dead oak limb galleries, along the branch-lines of a young downed tree, tracing every brancheation of its shadow on the snow.

Document: bedtime, 30 July 2012, Cherryfield, Me.

first thing
set rye baking
go dig grave
return & dress the lemon pie (rasp berries in meringue), brown w/rye
compose two quiches and chase the rye w/them
finish outer room
arrange fridge around beers
clean strawberries—whipping cream?
call Dickie
photogriff urn

Uncle Underwood

"Jonathan Kingsley Underwood was recorded in the Woodstock records under that name but as a man dropped the first name and was always known to his family as Kingsley Underwood. His first wife d. 6 Feb., 1824, and he m. (2) 30 Dec., 1834, Clarissa Gunn of Sunderland, Mass., b. 1 Aug., 1779; d. 27 Feb., 1850. Kingsley Underwood d. 2 Nov., 1849, the best-read man of his town, 'a man of original force of mind, wit, and poetic feeling'. Some of his poetical compositions still remain in the possession of the family of his grandson, Francis H. Underwood.
He wrote some articles for the press, one or more of which appear in Garrison's Emancipator. He was a strong anti-slavery, anti-masonic, and anti-alcohol advocate. The character of the blacksmith in Quabbin by Francis H. Underwood, which is a picture of Enfield, Mass., was based on Kingsley Underwood.
Some of his rhymes were spontaneous, made up naturally on the spur of the moment. We give one or two quaint samples of these of the spontaneous sort.

ON THE MARRIAGE OF ARIEL PARRISH AND ANNA WOODS. 
Of Aladdin's great lamp we have all heard the story 
How it rose in one night in full splendor and glory; 
But that is a fiction no mortal can swallow 
While a fact comes from Enfield which beats it all hollow, 
How a small piece of Woods, sure, the deuce must be in it, 
Was changed to a Parish in less than a minute.

In working the roads between Enfield and Ware there was once a dispute between the road-repairers of the two towns which led to considerable chaffing. On this occasion Kingsley Underwood gave vent to the following.

Dame Nature once in makin' land, 
Hed refuse left o' stones an' sand; 
She viewed it o'er, then flung it down 
Between Coy's Hill and Belchertown. 
Said she, 'Yeou paltry stuff, lie there!' 
An' made a town and called it Ware. 

Among his more extended rhymes was a long Essay on Melchisedek in which he attempted to prove that that personage was the second person of the Trinity. An account of his literary habits and writings but with no mention of name may be seen in Quabbin, pp. 66-67."

MARY FLANNERY

Livia in the morning

George Eliot:

"Where is the poem that surpasses the Task in the genuine love it breathes, at once toward inanimate and animate existence—in truthfulness of perception and sincerity of presentation—in the calm gladness that springs from a delight in objects for their own sake, without self-reference—in divine sympathy with the lowliest pleasures, with the most short-lived capacity for pain? Here is no railing at the earth's 'melancholy map', but the happiest lingering over her simplest scenes with all the fond minuteness of attention that belongs to love; no pompous rhetoric about the inferiority of the 'brutes', but a warm plea on their behalf against man's inconsiderateness and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness from their companionship in enjoyment; no vague rant about human misery and human virtue, but that close and vivid presentation of particular sorrows and privations, of particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions. How Cowper's exquisite mind falls with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail, and investing every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his song—not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless teapot holding a bit of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy town-lodging with a 'hint that Nature lives'; and yet his song is never trivial, for he is alive to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, but because his glance is clear and his heart is large."

meeting Samuel

She looks at me and I see
You
She builds these things
There was a shock of rye,
Hedgerows gave applefruit, mixed
Pippins from pitched cores, clatter
Of sicklebar bouncing past

It was like this when I
When Irishmen

Graveyards fill with
Kin. Can I really have come
Down this thread of dust? San Francisco's
Absent dead. My own
Grandfather killed
By Squakheags up the street and
Buried here, at this tulip-popple's feet?

Across the river breath
On glass, gladioli
Well-kept by hands with
Fingernails and everything

In 1965 there were two bands in the United States called "The Warlocks", one in New York and one in California; each was oblivious to the existence of the other and both changed their names before the end of the year – the west coast band to "The Grateful Dead" and the east coast band to "The Velvet Underground".

Her gaze upsets stone fences
Sheep browse woods crosshatched with her
Script; puzzled bleating over leaf litter, nosing after swards they
Grazed before, well-drop, time-lapse, silver salt, sparged
Malt. Raise spirit from sweet, apply to bloodstream, then
Look again. She's astride one, soft stink of unwashed
Fleece, where did these merinos wander from? I was down
The hill and heard them, Caldwell's flock, or Baker's: She
Never left, and bade them stay

steel curved without tension
into dissolving light that
tunneled under town

a rough disking, planted
to green sweetened by
veins of silver under
coppery silt, smells of
water-tower tar