02/02/04 notes. Warning: first draft, pretty wretched, and verbatim

Landscape devolves into the purity of the bare and level,
no mountains, no valleys, no canyon dentata
or mesoliths or redwoods borne before
the temple was razed or the Nazarene arrived,
or the execution site enshrouded in (eclipse) nightfall,
a cross-cut ring a section of what the giants ate.
Now everything's flat and severe. A line divides the land
from sky like the perfectly flat one on an oscilloscope of the dead,
the tone that says peace. Dormant matter is at peace with itself.
Please do not disturb. Two streaks at peace with one another
who cut diagonally across the sky and swiftly depart.
At first I thought they were meteors, but I was wrong.
And since I laid the last sentence down, they are gone,
fighter jets who follow the air lanes to Europe,
the Viking route, over Newfoundland and across
so little vegetation the hunters stare the hapless elk in the eye
before they fire, a denuded Ardennes.
In an earler day there might have been robbers
in teh woods. They kidnap children and diamonds.

"I don't seek necessarily to write a correct language"
said the don, "espacially when extremely pie-eyed
and afloat in the sky among clouds assuming the semblance
of my favorite animal crackers, my reward for decades
of scholarship an amnesia self-induced beclouding
roseate exactitude" so he muttered to the Dean of Arts
as he flapped his wings before the punch-bowl His eyes
popped out of his head at the stellar appearance of a protege
and when he skipped and danced around the crows someone
was reminded of Nijinsky in his mad phase, others thought
he was simply unsightly and tragic. There were naturlich followers
who saw him as flipping his bird at the establishment
but they were in a small minority and had never attended
the orgies he'd held at his suburban ranch when the kids
were packed away at summer camp, whiling away their days
frolicing on inner tubes in some Vermont lake or singing
folk-songs around a roaring campfire after nightfall's inauspicious advent.

The Don tripped upon a charcoal brazier and fell on his face.
the people around him feigned humor, surprise, and concern.
The host finally helped him on his feet and patted his shoulder.
"I liked the zebras the most" he said when erect again,
The ridges of the stripes impressed upon his tongue. He stuck it out
(cavities in his brain-mad-cow-disease-filled-with fluid
from which fat serpentine worms began to drink freely). His brain must be
full of absesses (he thought) until the interior assumes
a sublime appearance of gaping caves, deep unlit distances
that if illuminated, would recall the landscapes of Kaspar
David Friedrich, and he must have (so he speculated once
he was on his two feet) those twisted and unobserved
cypresses of early Romantic painting inside too. There must be valleys
that drop into abysses (his cortex, the whole spine, or his
windpipe) but once explored, interiors open to frontiers,
just as when you travel a desire to see a landmark when sated
opens up a space of regret for places contiguous yet unseen.
So I must be more of a nebula than an ocean he thought
as he emptied a succession of plastic champagne glasses
he'd procured from a servant's tray and re-deposited there.

The belly-lint, the feed-towers, the wives sorting the lint
into strands the sparrows like (they build their nests with it
inside the bushes). They hop on the driveway, which
was recently repaired, the yellow stripes, the fire-lanes.

[note: where it begins to go wrong must be at the beginning itself...]
**************************

The Hermitage: It's massive, daunting, meant to intimidate,
its multiple windows, its galleries and ballrooms. You can eat a cream tea in perfect silence hours before the place is stormed. Girls as nymphs
run through the hallways. a detail-an El Greco, or an Italian
master? A cat and chicken in accord beneath the Savior. The cat bows before the chicken pecking fed grain. But satirists place little dogs beside personified abuses of power, the legs on which they piss.
Stray dogs, their history obscure, no masters, no monuments for.
In big rooms, beneath ceilings too high to touch or to observe
the molding with anything other than field glasses, you can breathe,
not bump into someone awestruck. A meal far too cloying to consume.
What's wrong with coffee-table books? In a museum, among old masters,
you haven't a clue. You stare at a statue until its silhouette
becomes a statue-shaped hole in your head, until you notice
surroundings, blind as you are to the piece that brings them through
these doors in droves, three graves, a virgin, whatever. Who can read
the writing on such decorous walls? Inside the gold frames,
their moulding crashed neoclassically like waves on breakweaters, every motif goes black, the back side of some trick mirror, the side of an interrogator who cannot see the suspect, great works that melt away replaced by new ones, pigments that lose their fiery colors more slowly
no doubt than maple leaves just as the hardest glass
seeks a center of gravity inside its core.

[This concludes Feb. 2 2004 entry.]