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.