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

BLACK BOOKS

I. Jan 2009 Milbridge to pruning/nica Feb. through to New York for Passover
II. Marlboro May 2009 down to Philly & Alabama/Georgia summer up to Maine and picking season
III. Picking season 2009 down to Georgia w/Julian – caroling tour and bus up to NYC Jan 2010
IV. Charleston visit end of Jan 2010 through pruning season to Portland Easter early April 2010
V. Weare preparing nicaward to Cambridge, NYC lullaby test run
VI. Manahatta end of lullaby prototype tour Aug 2010 w/Jules & Roudy on through apple harvest, lullabying w/J. & Robbie, & NY/New England yo-yo ending in NYC 2nd-to-last week of March 2011 Holiday Surprise
VII. NYC Feb 2011 for Keri & Joe's wedding/ March for Holiday Surprise on through Massachusetts time w/Jules & R. and June Maine rambles till Indian Island w/Seth & Taylor
VIII. June 2011 Mainey rambles before entering money labor (Henry, Hugh, apples) through good postappling back to Maine and Tivoli caroling preparations
IX. Tivoli & NYC late Nov 2011 caroling that Dec, Maine Christmas, Ch'field, back to NYC 2 weeks in January, back to Ch'field then pruning March 2012

mexican blanket round her in
charry dirts. Ripe weeds seeding, crushed,
give chlorophyll breaths like a
mouth; I is a place I go
without you. Hard to
site this, skull-garlands rattling, my
body dancing on my body.

Young Master I. "Paddy Fermor" Ludders at an interfarc station in Stamboul, long ago

Δευ, Μάιος 10, 2004 12:21 pm
High spirits and a feeling of being out of touch with many people lead me to attempt a Marek/Jason-style "Dear Boxholder" narrative communication. You should read it as if I'd been sending such things all along, but you weren't ever getting them on account of some technical problem. Nor should you be alarmed if such technical problems recur in future.
************************
       The express bus from Alexandroupoli came to a final stop in the late afternoon drizzle of a huge dystopic bus-station complex outside of Istanbul and the charming community of its passengers immediately dissolved: the two Thracian Turks and the Iraqi Kurd and the Greek language that had afforded us our sweet temporary friendship – all vanished; to be replaced, quite unsatisfactorily, by a nightmare of tangled transportation networks and an incomprehensible mediating language. The two beautiful young Japanese women also vanished, but not till after one of them had turned herself into a rockstar by suddenly producing a guitar-case as she disembarked; the old expatriate Korean man who had accompanied the other – and whom I had imagined to be her father? teacher? lover? – I saw wandering away into the crowds without her, breaking my illusions: their relationship had apparently been as fleeting as mine with the Kurd.
       This interesting old Korean man had lived in Istanbul for some years and had periodically turned in his seat throughout the course of the bus ride to give me advice, in his thin English, on my visit to The City; so I caught up to him in the confusion of the station to ask how I should get downtown and where would I find a cheap hotel. He turned his tired eyes and, recognizing me, began to speak, gesticulating vaguely this way and that: but I could pick out only a very few words – "pension," "bazaar," "ichiban" – for he spoke not in English but in Japanese, the language of his many hours' commerce with the young woman. Not wanting to embarrass him by pointing out his mistake, I listened for some thirty seconds, nodding politely; when he'd finished I said thank you and goodbye and we parted. I found my way to an ATM machine and withdrew 450 million Turkish Lira from my Bank of New Hampshire account and bought a map of Istanbul (1 million). I then approached a man and had an unexpectedly difficult time, without "language", formulating the question "Where on this map are we?" When he finally came to understand the puzzling charade, my interlocutor responded by indicating, quickly and gracefully, that we were in fact outside of the bounds of the map; so I bought a subway token (1 million), determined cartographically which track to take, and in subterranean blindness passed under the ancient crumbling span of battlemented Byzantine walls and into The City they compassed.
       There followed two weeks of happy ambulatory investigation

cream of pulled pint, pulled
shot, a surface
effect. I gobble your
softnesses, oak tree; I
kiss all your branches dear beech dear
pecan! Where God becomes self-conscious, there
I am. Have I always loved
the wobbly; did the trains used to go
there; when did you move
thence; nineteen seventy-five. Before I was born
of my mother, though she'd given her first
that August. September follows
me. When certain cheeses age their flesh
darkens and they develop
delicious crystalline flecks, butterflies all so
peaceful in Bruce's yard, fireflies flickering
about us: books can only
moulder but maybe
a bit of sacred statuary rests with
us, breathing.

thumb scad, the
blood creeps out and all the rest
is as it was not. Time is represented
by sunlight. Moving into the shade with
you, did you get all my letters? I asked for
sparkling water. Reading them with some delicious
coffee: sparged malts, running up and down
stairs. Phosphorescent bugs like
stars. Grime of dead man's house a
comfort worth keeping.