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!

Claremont, 245

A big rock-maple takes my headstone in slow swallow, the slate asleep while its willow weeps with inward, earthward strength. Like chilamates we send down eager root-mass from every branch. Deep, back, past the rising balconies from which all these hundred years wave, these hundred-fifty years, these two-hundred years. New England. We took to the tides and didn't rejoin the schooner till our duri was good and full with about half an inch freeboard. Women working the kitchen's smoke, wise, smiling women who've made us up like stories, watch through the ventanilla del cuecho as we come up from the boats.

how we got our name

http://robinamer.com/2009/02/10/inside-out-names/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/kent/content/articles/2005/10/17/rugby_match_report_aylesford_151005_feature.shtml

"Me han estremecido un montón de mujeres..."

love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love

"Y tú apareces en mi ventana, suave y pequeña, con alas blancas..."

Pieris rapae, male. As if it manifested directly out of the energy of my unseasonable butterfly-hunger, or out of the vibration-field stitched through the many lepidopterical books that I'd left piled around the desk by the window against whose panes it was so suddenly flittering. Its tiny delicate abdomen, thickly furred, its hindwing undersides shot through with the pierid's special greenish-yellow cast. Irreducible. What cabbage brought you here, into this house, into the room I grew up in, in February? Where did your larval self live? Chant me your lines, how many generations of milky flight from Québec 1860 to here & now?

Vanessa atalanta

Last year it was almost the whole season before I saw a red admirable, even though I'd been down in the Crimea those couple deep summer weeks among the long-tailed skippers, hackberry emperors, common snouts, gulf fritillaries, etc., and the Gallonses had gotten to see that one in Central Park. I was walking in Zeke's orchard, late fall, with Pavel Durgeyevich: he was the one noticed it and called me over. It sat for us a long time on the gloss of a toothy apple leaf which bobbed lightly with the afternoon's breathing. The blue patch was pretty much faded out, but what a lovely creature! I had no film with me; nevertheless the color-saturation comes easily to me now even against today's wintry palette, fat bright apple-skins punctured by the stubbly green gold at our feet like that moment in Emily Dickinson.

Ong textbook:

"Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience. The writer's audience is always a fiction. The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves. Even in writing to a close friend I have to fictionalize a mood for [him], to which [he] is expected to conform. The reader must also fictionalize the writer. When my friend reads my letter, I may be in an entirely different frame of mind from when I wrote it. Indeed, I may very well be dead. For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive. Most books extant today were written by persons now dead. Spoken utterance comes only from the living."

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Lulu? That vital shakti which Wm. Blake called Orc, what makes the heart run, lets its holes work, lets the whales surface & breathe inside my chest which is almost hers, almost hers: identity happens, I become tidal desire without object, gas footlights grab & catch at the hems of me – all flames, like Emma Livry! A woman lives her full soul's size and the man-worlds around her topple like cardhouses, damning. Almost she routs the evil even from the Ripper's own heart but the poison letter of maleness arrives, enfin, as the letter always arrives. «Male journey» comme on dit. Must this letter always arrive? It musn't; with your help, héros, with your ashes and answers, I begin to rip the Jack from my own root. Jack, Mack: stiff, flip-flopping lozenge of green barred with black. Le couteau sur la table disparaît au cours du repas.

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Lady Lazarus? Death finds its way into a body's life like psychology into the jīva but my heart sometimes blinds its fingers' tips down a run of big jade or smoky-quartz beads all the way to a darkness so big it equals all of space and brings calm as it's clear it can't ever end: and the beads were words, we find, when the lamp gets its wick lit & the glass chimney's set. Words made into pomes. Hard linguage-forms exceed the page, strange fruit in excess of her mouth and mine. Slang & psychology mix, promiscuous, with simple sublimity of space in the uneven rise of the lines, my dory good and wet, its seams all proven, off beautiful Nauset. Elle est partie, elle est là.

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Sassafras? Bright insensible steel of the kettle at purr on the meetinghouse stove, quaker-light invading the space like vodka. Sunday morning always resists being kept outside with the dogs and the ducks. I wonder if you understood the way I felt about the stove, an Atlantic, cast at a forge in Portland (556) half a century ago. I remember slipping you a note rolled tight round a heavy little bottle, launching the surplus of me otherward, into the meshes of the Symbolic Order, from my island. Mon naufrage. The streaming light from the window snags its beams against a hip of the kettle, forming a little pucker of emptiness. I stare into this clear glare-knot and it's a tear, a hole, a puncture in the colored field of forms filling the jewel-organs of my sight: stove, pipe, steam, painted & unpainted wood – behind all this rich ecstatic maya-tissue lies a pure spatiality of empty light et ça c'est toi, c'est Toi.

SANJURO

We were all thirty, like Sylvia Plath. Clouds had been scudding across the squinting eye of each of our hearts ever since we could remember. That they began to clear off, that a sky was found to be behind them, seemed less important at the time than that we were suffering suddenly beyond precedent.

Want to be punished like this.

I was such an idiot. I didn't know anything about mystery or majesty. I didn't understand how plants worked & wasn't interested in learning. None of the food I liked to eat was good for me. I hurt people, I didn't know how to open up to them. The word "love" was as blank a thing to me as a butterfly was; and that latter I'd just as soon have killed as photographed – that is if I were ever even to notice one, which I never did.
Happily, though, my crianza played itself out in brutal Bucks County, where one is not allowed to go on for too long without being made to account for oneself.

Recordar

To remember;
from the Latin re-cordis,
to pass back through the heart.

Žižekniks bloggling

Things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. What we call creation is a cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe. [...]
Love is a cosmic imbalance. I have always been disgusted with the idea of universal love. Love is an extremely violent act. It's not "I love you all." Love means "I pick out something," it's a structure of imbalance. Even if this something is a small detail, I say "I love you more than anything else." In this quite formal sense love is evil.

TANTRAMAR

Les foins qui nous ramassions dans nos doris –
salt hay like down Plum Island where the Merrimac dumps –
midst clamor of waterfowl, Akkadie!

Someone took this picture of me ten years ago at that Vienna kaffeehaus (whose name eludes me) famous for having been the first place in "Europe" ever to serve the stuff, back in Ottoman days. I was there to celebrate the release of my cousin's first record. It seems like I was much younger than I am now. Her record was great, we all loved it then, and it's since become a classic throughout Mitteleuropa. Massy tides of memory. I hadn't seen the photo for some time: it surprised me last night coming out from between two pages of a volume of Βιζυηνός that I've been revisiting. I like the affection I feel for myself when I look through this little window across a decade's distance.

The floor shakes under my belly for a minute and a half as the Odessa train hauls itself past our house. I'm on the parquet most of the morning, my torso propped up on its elbows to effect a slight back-bend (countering the ache resultant of too far a walk on pavements last night with heavy bag of new books & no arch-supports) and to free up my hands for the sketch-work spread out on the floor before me. Sketching the several interesting varieties of flowering shrub that hang so insistently, so independently, so immediately in the dense silver-washed air of the world captured by the collection of Crimean War photographs my brother brought home for me from Jassy. I'll show my sketches to Pavel Durgeyevich who is sure to be able to identify them.

Thin paper, weakened by the wet of a drizzly run of days & a crying jag, parts against the slight tug of Beard Street's cobbles like the jib sheet of a Gloucester schooner struggling against gales up the Gulf toward Βοστόνη. Voice gives to gulf of silence, inscription eclipsed by the hollow behind it. Day blooms.