DINNER ON THE GROUNDS

"Sweet; unsweet; coke."

BOUSECHEEK

Too hot to keep chocolate; it runs all over. Every time I take a sip of mate it immediately comes dribbling out through my skin. At the botanical garden I was talking to Jophet by the cacao tree and couldn't believe the amount of brine coming out of me. I got sunburned from sitting & reading in total shade. The twisty red candle on the windowsill relaxed its shape and leaned itself curvily against the pencil-sharpener. I put icecubes in my lemonwater to cool it and they were gone in less than a minute. I put four more in; they were pea-sized a minute later when I went to drink.

Lenya and I were back and forth between Chişinău and Medea gathering our weathers to go south with my tocayo to fête Jophet, who awaited us – and her thirtieth birthday – in Tallapoosa. In one of those meantime evenings I rode bikes out the bay with some Chişinău friends to see if my uncle's schooner was coming in off the banks yet. It was. I'd spoken with Lenya that evening and we had a loose plan to find Jophet at dark and watch some bad films with him; leaving the sunset-glow of the pier toward that end I had the pleasure of encountering Ralu, whom I'd not met before but about whom I'd heard much from Lenya. Her sister took this photograph.

They were clumsy together. The three had shared a couple Augusts' worth of the intimacy of I want to know where this one is going.

Jophet is in Tallapoosa in joy of thirty-first birth & thirtieth cumplimiento. Her bicycle moves through the palpable heat like a flinder-mouse, finely awake to each synchronous valence. She navigates libraries with the grace and force of her years. Her succulents thrive. She can be reduced to no collection of details. Having ganged south to give love and hugs engendered perennially in them by her and having now ganged north again, her tribu already wants more such outlet!

Have you ever seen anything like that before in your whole entire life?

Harvest, Herbst, Κάρπος

Many species of Lycaenid, including our common Everes comyntas, are myrmecophilous in the larval stage – that is, their caterpillar-body will secrete sweet liquors tasty enough to ants to cause them to tend and protect the caterpillar much as a little frontier family would their milch cow. One species, however, complicates or upsets this image most compellingly. Far from settling for the peaceful model available to it as a Lycaenid, whereby it might live out its larval life transforming vegetable matter partly into butterflyward body mass and partly into a sugar-tithe for its protectors, Feniseca tarquinius chooses, inexplicably, fauna over flora as the fodder for its larval stage. Alone in this choice among all North American butterflies, the handsome caterpillar gobblingly ravages its way among the plump little bodies of the Wooly Aphid (Eriosomatinae): the larva of which, it should be noted – and there must be some kind of reason for this disturbing quasi-symmetry – is myrmecophilous.

Bellows Falls Library

I try to be present!

Happy Birthday Ian!

Applying mulch to raspberry beds in sweet May's sudden summer heat: forehead drops prayer-beads of sweat into the riotous dandy-grass alive with bees between my brother's australian boot and my brother's australian boot. Eight species of butterfly intimately met over the day, three of them exposed to reversal film, two of them taken onto my finger. No bulls, so much the better. A baby instead. Birdlets' beaks gaping in their nest. A couple dozen good oysters from Long Island Sound.

love for you on motherday

Cold / Caldo /:/ Black / Blanc

Opposition always devolves immediately into something gentler, more complicated, more porous toward the ichors of loving-kindness. That's if the energies of breath are left to their own magical devices; being that our bodies bound breath in muscular constrictions and that from this we tend to generate notions of selfhood identifiable with body, sometimes the fiction of opposition is maintained and carried to elaborate rhetorical ends by parties who feel it auspicious to oppose one another.

The perennial presence of you in me; the continuous vibration of those moments of luminous intimacy, the surprising way they're free to move in time loosely, erratically, irreverently, with rasp of wing-rustle, like how a perfect early Mourning Cloak moves in space. Or like how a Baltimore Checkerspot does, bright and brindled under the light of your lucky eyes that time in the grass above where the sweet and the salt waters mix.

I could mask this. I could pretend that my memories are of my young youth and of Tamara, whose school was across the piazza from mine in Baku and with whom I precociously eloped in the dory we built together over the course of two tense, rainy months; or that this first, indelible, irreducible love was wrought in me by sinewy Rula, the tough fifty-year-old Greek with the disarming serviceberry eyes who'd been a guerrilla leader during the civil war and whom I came to know in her exile in Tashkent through the sister of the tutor I'd engaged on barter-terms to help me with the pleasurably vexatious jargon of Το Χρονικόν του Μορέως.

I can wear a mask, I can put a mask aside. It's you, You are that love, you're the one I think of and dream of, the one my heart smiles at. My whole heart moves out of this body, embraces that one (yours); forgets its place; stumbles; is ecstatic.

I feel your wings moving, you're on my shirtsleeve; the air between your powdery scales and my pale blue squinty eyes is a live, sensitive tissue. Our presence is common. I feel you kissing me, me kissing you, in love, soft mouths, gently, again and again, continuously – even though I'm just here in the sunlight, sitting, and you're just there on my shirtsleeve.

The world is my blank

At loss; shucking Glidden Points. Taking Wellfleets with beer, cheers to lady Lenya. Standing against the gunwale of my dory I send fifteen-foot tongs down into the salt-&-sweet of the harbor's waters, extend my self: come up with half a dozen good Malpeques. Swallow sea, swallow you, drown, in love!

BELLOWS FALLS LIBRARY

dear /brokenheart /gleams of loving /complicated ways /together & rise together, breathe /chosen /frame /as sapwood turns inward and becomes heartwood /losses; loving /lonely too, reading Virginia Woolf, coming home /planty, tenuous /riding my bike /unsettled springweather /connecticut river /gentleness of death /baby /31 /clouds of love /maritimes /Further prospects /brief life /excitement and lightness /measure of heavyhearted sadding /wanting /I most love /gushing spring /beautiful /glad nonetheless /All I can /hardly /let alone /capabilities /buoyancy /hopeful /no place in the world /fairly clear /hold you close /miss /your

SWEET OLD WORLD

Metals invisibly alter the acid-structure of the proteins I beat in this copper bowl or heat in that iron pan. Nero d'Avola blackens my glass, leavens the spinning sink of me, purples my kiss-hungry mouth. I begin to sing, first in one language, then another, then in both at once, like Guillaume de Machaut. When my body started rejecting flesh it got crazy for fish. Now I'm nervous whenever I'm any distance from the seacoast. My money wanders off, sometimes returns to me brightened with gifts. I want you, are you reading this?

I give up

"In a room the size of one solitude
my heart
the size of one love
looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness..."

(In Yunanistan, among leps, or among lepers; in a leftover building; Bildungsroman mythologies pushing and pinching at the edges of the overdetermined continent of my personhood; pâte brisée against a wet fork's tongs; drift.)

"...dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:
'I love your hands.'

I will plant my hands in the flowerbed
I will sprout, I know, I know, I know
and the sparrows will lay eggs
in the hollows of my inky fingers..."

Nationalist bile leaks all over foodstuffs which like languages seem to be so much grounded in their special ecology, their ring of mountains, their big river, and which like languages are: phonetic/vibrational sympathy with place is real, terroir is real – but also real is the endless shaivist dance of people over the rind of this beloved burning sphere. Apples wandered west from Alma Ata along the spice-road with the cinnamons and cloves and nutmegs that the dirty euro-lords were needing so badly in those days to mark their class difference: as amurrikan as apple pie, a promiscuous medieval fusion food with Central Asian roots! Likewise, for unnecessary example, eighteenth-century London slang is full of Hindi words on account of the gypsies who held such lovely & subtle sway there then, the gypsies having wandered from India centuries before; and a Turkish sweet-shop in Bergama was perfectly manageable by me with my Greek as all the pastry-names one learns in Greece are already Turkish.
>>SPIT!<<
It's like my old Phanariot grandfather used to always say, "Nationalist bile is the worst sauce."
***
"The Dutchmen [(Deutsch-"men")] of Pennsylvania's hills and valleys loved sauerkraut so much that they not only honored New Year's dinner with it, they even wrote poems and songs in its honor. During the First World War, when an edgy government attempted to rename sauerkraut "Liberty Cabbage," a fighting Dutchman named Charles Calvin Ziegler wrote these lines in its defense:

'Liberty Cabbage' now's the name,
But the thing remains the same.
Has it not the old aroma?
Is not "Liberty" a misnomer?
Why discard the name as hellish?
When the thing itself you relish?
You may flout it and may scold –
No name fits it like the old.
When applied to Sauer Kraut,
Liberty, beyond a doubt,
Loses something of her halo.
Should this little bit of reason
Be adjudged an act of treason
You may thrust me into jail O,
But in spite of all your pains,
SAUERKRAUT it still remains."

Big Juri was over last week with his spunky little bud of a granddaughter to help my brother harvest and sort his tulsi. My brother is all about ayurveda and thinks of tulsi as material for a special tisane good for the health of our bodies, whereas I feel it to be the living, photosynthesizing body of the goddess Tulasi Devi and am squeamish about the idea of gathering its leaves with an end toward boiling them in water. I took pictures, hammed for little Rosebud, laughed nervously in strained chitchat with my brother.

A plant can retreat so far from the complexities of its oak and dogrose forebears into the shaivist asceticism of the desert of no-thought mind that it becomes a tiny, needless body consisting only of a rootlet and two bright little leaves: but this creature will, with all the power of its prana, be yet capable of giving vaginal birth to live gemmy stones!