Gemmage des Pins, autrefois

The soil is clay and its surface is wet everywhere, even the high ground, even after many nights of stars and wind. The river is huge and expressionless; the mountain-shapes that rise on its nether bank are only shapes, without the Gaudier-Brzeskan sculptural energy that inheres to our mountains. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath drink martinis together in Boston, wanting to die. I corral language-powers into the various strands of my correspondence. These two things are common between Frank Speck and me: a working knowledge of modern Greek, and that "penny postcards comprise the larger part of his literary remains". Strunk & White say the period should go inside the quotation marks in this and any other case; I'm afraid British usage feels much more correct to me on this point. Minor treason. What a golden flower was Manhattan Island this morning. I walked buoyantly through it in spite of having been drinking last night till three with Raymond Marunas's ghost. The carillon at Grace Church on Broadway broke into sudden cumbrous song around noon, staggering in and out of key with massive clangor; it was the stone of the church itself that was ringing, and we were all rising with it into the richer light. On Fourth Avenue I handled but did not buy a clean copy of the 1955 Poems (E.D.), one hundred dollars. How many skulls around my neck already. These thick textures of māya, punctured and sewn; unsewn; reassembled in their original order by matching up the paper's stress-marks and stains.

Oakland Ave

Your two Julia Child volumes pressed up against my Paul Robeson 78s; the silver coil of the stove-door handle; your Canadian guitar; the rug from my brother's boyhood; the socks you knit me.

Caligo

Black Book

Spanish bullseye: Diana.

NYRB: "Cavafy, a happy practicioner of samizdat..."

Genetic event of apple extends into time by persistence of tree life, or by human grafting culture, or by a rootsucker's taking over from dead or moribund tree.

"Numb as a hake," old downeast language.

1804 1 billion
1927 2 billion
1960 3 billion
1974 4 billion
1987 5 billion
1999 6 billion
2011 7 billion
Julia says it's obvious why no one ever talks about it.

Picking with Jason: springtime snowmelt thrills, ripe autumn's fruit.

The finite Atom infinite
That forms thy circle's centre-dot

Cerebral/spinal/genital matter one continuum.

Peggy on tofu: "It was like chicken but it wasn't chicken it was that other stuff they use."

Columbus card traditionally played as triumph of reasoning cognition over murky phantasms of medieval concept of world; in fact Admiral C. (in name & spirit of dull, blind, protocapitalist prerogatives of the flat world) ruptured stale certainties of boundaried "known" of Europe and precipitated its opening to wonder. (Weschler's book on Museum of Jurassic Technology)

"The pathologists recommend a prebloom schedule involving a tank mix of mancozeb at 3 pounds per acre plus captan-80 at 1.5 to 3 pounds per acre."

Non's fitt to live
But who is fitt to die