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.
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       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.

salts gloving them, their
wiry lengths stretch, buckle,
bend, I'm
subjected to tests,
object to their
amputation

glassy breadths can't
see, one or the
Other

breathing into the
hollow behind your breasts

Young Zack (Jonathan Richman)

Joseph Sikes & Carrie Losneck

Uncle Ian et al.

Sass & Zack

Avah & Owen

Fabiola & Esteban

Easter, 2012

[W. Benjamin: Every date from the sixteenth century trails purple after it. Those of the nineteenth century are only now receiving their physiognomy.]

Lilac incipience, quince bush blushing, I am
In this; No. Weare, 1956, Colburn's store; Armand and
Marcy's; lemons & eggs. An ash so big it can't but lift
One's thoughts to God. This run of Piscataquog shallows was
A millpond in living memory. Animate
The dust: tiny mammals with Algonkian names.

BANGALORE 1875

Before the myth. Sue Dickinson to the Springfield DAILY REPUBLICAN, for publication 18 May 1886.

The death of Miss Emily
E. Dickinson, daughter of the
late Edward Dickinson,
at Amherst on Saturday last
makes another sad inroad
upon the small circle so long
occupying the old family mansion.
It was for a long generation over-
looked by death, and one in
passing in and out there, could
but think of old fashioned times,
when parents and children
grew up to and passed maturity
together, in lives of singular
uneventfulness, unmarked by
sad or joyous crises. Very few in the
village knew Miss Emily per-
sonally, except among the older
inhabitants, although the fact
of her seclusion and intellectual
brilliancy was one of the familiar
Amherst traditions. There are many homes
among the classes into which
her treasures of fruit and
flowers and almost ambrosial
dishes for the sick and well
were constantly sent, that will
forever miss those dainty traces
of her unselfish devotion and be
moved afresh that she screened
herself from closer acquaintance.
As she passed on in life, her
sensitive nature shrank from much
personal contact with the world,
and more and more she turned
to her own large wealth of
individual resources, for companion-
ship – sitting henceforth, as some
one said of her, "In the light of
her own fire". Not disappointed
with the world, not an invalid
till within the past two years – not from
any lack of all embracing love,
and sympathy – not because she
was insufficient for any mental
work, or social career, her en-
dowments being so exceptional,
but the "mesh of her soul" as
Browning calls the body, was too
rare, and the sacred quiet of her
own home proved the native at-
mosphere for her worth and
work. All that must be inviolate.
One can only speak of
"Duties beautifully done" – of her
gentle tillage of the rare flowers
filling her conservatory, into
which, like the heavenly Paradise,
entered nothing that could
defile, and which was ever
abloom in frost or sunshine, so
well she knew her chemistries –
of her gentle tenderness to all
in the home circle – her gentle-
woman's grace, and courtesy to
all who served in house, and
grounds – of her quick rich re-
sponse to all who rejoiced, or
suffered at home, or among her
wide circle of friends the world
over. This side of her nature was
to her, the real side – this, the
entity in which she rested, so
simple and strong was her instinct
that a woman's hearth-stone is
her shrine. Her talk and her
writings, were like no one else,
and although she never published
a line, now and then some en-
thusiastic literary friend, would
turn love to larceny, and cause
a few verses surreptitiously obtained,
to be printed. Thus, and through
other natural ways, many saw
and admired her verses, and
in consequence frequently
notable persons paid her visits,
hoping to overcome the protest
of her own nature and gain a
promise of occasional contri-
butions at least to various
magazines. She withstood
the fascinations of Helen Jackson
who earnestly sought her
co-operation in a novel in
the "No Name Series", although
one little poem strayed in
some way into the volume
of verses in that edition.
Her pages would illy have
fitted even so attractive a
story as "Mercy Philbrick's
Choice", unwilling as the
public are to believe she
had no part in it: "Her
wagon was hitched to a star"
and who could ride or write
with such a voyager.
A Damascus blade
gleaming, and glancing
in the sun was her wit.
Her swift poetic rapture
like the long glistening
note of a bird one hears
in the woods in June at high noon,
but never can see. Like
a magician she caught
the shadowy apparitions of
her brain and tossed them
in startling picturesqeness
to her friends, who charmed
with their simplicity and
homeliness, as well as pro-
fundity, fretted that she
had so easily made palpable,
the tantalizing fancies forever
eluding their bungling
fettered grasp. So intimate
and passionate, her love of
Nature, she seemed herself a part
of the high March sky – the
Summer day and bird call.
Keen and eclectic in her
literary tastes, she sifted
Libraries to Shakespeare and
Browning – quick as lightning
in her intuitions, and analyses,
she seized the kernel in-
stantly, almost impatient
of the fewest words by which
She must make her revelation.
So her life was rich, and
all aglow with God and
immortality – with no creed –
no formulated faith, hardly
knowing the names of dogmas
she walked this life, with
the gentleness and reverence
of old saints, with the firm
step of martyrs who sing
while they suffer. How better
note the flight of this "Soul
of fire in a shell of pearl"
than by her own breathings
Morns like these, we parted
Noons like these, she rose.
Fluttering first, then firmer
To her fair repose.

May I trouble you dear
Sam to pardon untidyness of
this, for I am weary and sick.
Also to return this.
As ever yours – S.H.D

Will you have "gentlewoman"
printed as one word? not
with a hyphen –

Retour de la pêche aux huîtres

Bivalve women,
You gave me bones
And twisted this from
Sally-rods & withy. Fishers
Of men. Proud hips and
Bellies swallow us, belie a
Fictive swarm, the sunlit
World before, trees,
Shore and seas, the islands
Into sky. Thin vision-tissue, gently
Torn – that lighthouse, and the glare
Off sleek and swollen
Waves, white light of empty God
Behind the scene.

Я - Ахматова

For years I confused Saints Dominic and Bernard, to the grave detriment of my relationship with the latter's substantial & sparkling presence in The Perennial Philosophy. Sunset at Oak Hill Cemetery in Brewer, god-bodkin blood leaking up under black trees' bared teeth in the middle distance: Flannery O'Connor. Fannie Hardy Eckstorm is buried here, somewhere under all this Christmas snow. I can't find her today, my usual knack (which brought me & my bike pauselessly direct to Timothy Swan's white obelisk back in October, Northfield) falters. Walking the Joshua Chamberlain bridge back over the Penobscot Bangorward I'm singing "Kwe ya he no" and thinking on poor Jael Hilderbrand of Pleasant Point.

Arlington

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