Black Book

Hollywood gives us two plumbers: Rosscoe Arbuckle, plumber from Hell, plumber who should have stayed plumber, Lucifer-plumber, plumber who climbed too high & plumbed too deep; and Cluny Brown, lovely lively Jennifer Jones in elegant froth of Lubitsch's last film which is a distillate in spite of itself of all his good world, and she the best good plumber, the unstopper of drains, the angel of flush and of flow.

McGee: Espresso debuted at Paris Expo 1855. The pressure extracts & emulsifies oils making for velvet & foam of well-pulled shot. Pu-erh: "All of its Phenolic contents are converted into nonastringent thearubigens and brown complexes."

Wheeler saw featured as tool-of-the-month in Martha Stewart Living, Feb. 2001. Made by OESCO Inc., Conway Mass; first made in Belchertown ca. 1945

Webster: "NINE, noun. The number composed of eight and one; or the number less by a unit than ten; three times three."

Ojibwa and Potawatami bands from around Great Lakes deployed 1200 warriors against New York and New England during the War of the Austrian Succession, 1744-48.

It is through la pauvreté, l'échec, et la mort that we draw near to God.

Emily Dickinson. The Johnson numbers come easily to us; we to whom come easily also her common meter and hymnic register, we living residues of the psalming system that was her template.

Gypsy slot filled for Eurofolk on Mount Desert by Wabanaki with baskets & fortune-telling.

Bruce in Dedham reading comic book while riding bike, got in a terrible accident: hit from behind, a hit & run! Left me for dead! Kid found me brought me home, I said to my sister, "Don't tell Mother!"

Max Hastings on Patrick Leigh Fermor: "Wearing his literacy light as wings, brimming over with laughter."

Elizabeth Coane Goodfellow arrived in Philadelphia 1806, credited w/inventing Lemon Meringue Pie.

Tide turned just before the Congo church struck two – boats moored at the river's mouth were bow-upstream; they moved slowly upriver, reached the resistance of their moorings, turned.

Jeanne d'Arc: "Pensez vous que nostre seigneur n'ait de quoy les vestir?"

In Milton's cardboard heaven: Transpose theological reality into time, i.e. into "Greek Mythology".

Bruce: Alice and I were just barefooted kids, in our twenties – invited to a party at Domenico's tower – we walked around the tower, and Domenico is there with this most beautiful woman – Alice was so impressed – and we could hear them softly speaking Italian – (stopped by quiet tears)

Frank Speck: the "bush economy" of long hunting trips provides a space for the survival of pre-contact material culture.

Perch, flounder, smelt, skate, dab, plaice, pout, scup.

"In prayer he did not stop at the frontiers of his knowledge and his reasoning. He adored God and God's mysteries as they are in themselves and not as he understood them."

"Charles Quincy Goodhue (1835-1910) spent the last twenty years of his life sketching Portland as it had looked before the fire of 1866."

Bruce: "Jones is a Welsh name, know what it means? Smith."

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby hangs out his shingle in Belfast, Maine, 1847: "Clockmaker, Mesmerist, Healer, Daguerrian Artist."

Mother Ann: "Sweep clean."

Peter Benes's crazy science: Plymouth County "geometric" designs represent embryonic angels; late-century explicit angel facialization is post-resurrection imaging of same "after their translation into time-resistant celestial beings".

Moose are like whales.

Welcome to Old Town

Canoe is a Taíno word, recorded by Columbus after his initial Bahamian intercourse with these, his first Indians. The word was transmitted among the European languages as applied indiscriminately to any of the diverse boats used in the waters of the American hemisphere. (According to the same pidgin grammar, all the varied people who designed, built, and employed these boats were called Indians.) The differences between, for example, the dugout Miskito coasting duri – etymon to our Gulf of Maine banks dory – and the lightweight Penobscot birchbark agwiden were thus linguistically sublimated. James Rosier writes in 1605 of the Wabanaki Canoas; Plymouth County Court Records attribute an accidental drowning death in 1660 to a "naughty canoo". In consequence to the Northeast's becoming the locus of England's greatest successes in American colonization, and to the obvious superiorities of its ingenious portageable design, the cedar-&-birch boat of the Maine woods came eventually to eclipse all else in the semantic field "canoe". The integrity of the design was found to survive the replacement of its birchbark & sprucegum sheath with one of painted canvas, and the Old Town Canoe Co. began at the end of the 19th century to produce them this way in great quantity and to market them aggressively. Today as one enters Old Town the welcome sign reads, somewhat redundantly, "Welcome to Old Town, Home of the Old Town Canoe". Indian Island in Old Town being – and having been, from time immemorial – the axial hub of the Penobscot nation, whose agwiden is the unaltered, already-perfect prototype to our modern canoe, the sign should read, "Welcome to Old Town, Home of the Canoe".

Did, almost; you wrest it, wore. Sail. Hundred yards wet canvas belly out, smacks scatter after mackerel. Wood mixes with another element, bleaches red pants pink.

This is one nephew; and it is another nephew's third birthday today. Praise God. My broken axle. I'd procured a new one, five dollars, but on trying to install it soon found it was too short. Grease all over my hands, hungry: only donuts, and those frozen. Eat them frozen. Who ever heard of freezing a donut. I'll miss the bus! Tomorrow heavy rain, can't ride from station. My eyes: why can't I focus on anything? Was that sucker-whip during the Gorham pruning a couple months back as damaging as that? Apparently so. And my camera lens too somehow sympathetically declined into blurs & spots. Give up on bus, ride back to bike shop to find a longer axle. They don't have one. Get my dollars back and bring them to the shop in the "New System Laundry" building; leave with a gnarly-looking axle and head for Eastern Cemetery to reflect. Cemetery gates locked, absurd: richest butteriest light of the day, finest time to visit that place. Sundown hour conceptualized on winter-terms, habit, leftover. Climb fence; my eyes! Trees blurry, House Island & Whitehead heartstring-strumming impressionistic visual processes off in the blue of god. Slip and hit knee, hard. Am I dying?

Aglianico

The word is for greek
it came out of greek
ink-wine, oaked
bright phenols in
those parts of my mouth
and yours. I walked with it
into late light, shiva beads
round me. Hailed by whom,
my blurry eyes: oh, him! Smile,
sit & finish glass on blanket, might as well
be a hitchhiking poem. Chuang Tzu couldn't
be more than. How will your apartment. Bread &
oil like carnal. When another could just as.

i dreamed i was a piece of board and that the blanket was a piece of bookcloth and it was a very complicated portfolio and i sat up and couldn't move for a long time because i was thinking i wouldn't remember how all the pieces went together and i couldn't figure out if it was important. and i couldn't remember what bodily functions could have possibly woken me, finally i pieced together 1. peeing 2. shitting 3. bleeding and then i realized one of those three things at least must be imperative and then i slowly realized that it was ok to let go of the pieces of the portfolio...