There is a frame and eyeglass and rectangular lens by which to view the contents of the frame. Call it Art, call it Context, what you will.
Inside the frame a note-sized sheet of vellum paper, of the creamy, linen sort for invitations requiring RSVPs, or table napkin on which a revered author scribbled some notes, perhaps a stanza or an opening line to a story finished elsewhere.
Someone, an author himself, an unfinished novel under his belt, scrutinizes the table napkin scribbling or the vellum fragment nested in the frame with the eyeglass and rectangular lens. His monograph depends upon his tracking the source of this fragment, whose hand this fragment fell into.
Worlds hinge upon this monograph of words, disproving other sources also, firestorms inside the academy. Let’s retrace the steps, change the conversation.
With what I find beneath this eyeglass, I stir the sluggish pot. So my findings resound.
Monday, February 28, 2011
May 29, 2010 Saturday
The house cat who can swallow the bird, softening the bones within its jaw, can live, can learn to live away from the house, can lose its master among the fields, stalking in its moonlit happy valley, scratching its claws on the bark of fallen tree-trunks and branches, testing its strength among the woodland debris, the expanse of hay and fallen leaves, his whole creation yawning before him.
Pine for October’s gothic enclosures already, valleys and overcast skies with bats swooping over the traveler’s head after sunset. Who can count how many bicycles in retrospect caromed down Academy Road during the fitful peak of day while I only watched them, a spectator at my improvised work-desk, also breakfast table. The woods were behind me. Far back a pioneer’s cabin burned down, a hermitage that could have doubled as a military barracks, so Spartan and scornful of modernity were its inhabitants, sending their sons to the foreign wars of each generation, their Protestant heritage refusing to soften before the spectacle of eastern caravans and oriental covertness and obsequies. About the deadly follies of the Asiatics, they can only sigh and hope for a swift and brutal Viking conversion, modified naturally by American-mandated tastes for consumer items, a volley of choices you are free to refuse as an individual but not to expel as a collective force. And the sons.
They ironed the kinks of bohemian inclinations from their sons at a very early date, although the inheritance was humble and the financial ties light. Any waywardness or sign of easy virtue among their daughters the mother stigmatized upon first hearing, swiftly and brutally. The women were pretty, severe and disapproving of the mores of the time, their opinions more inflexible than their spouses. They wore their hair au natural and never wore makeup, a trait that one might mistakenly associate with hippies. But now the house was gone and the remnants were in tents and storage sheds after the embers from the posts and beams had cooled in the meadow where the frost had settled.
I found a small plant, spongy with ridges as if the stem were trying to leaf but couldn’t, spread over a rock and growing in the lawn of the front yard where the grass had browned out. I brought a handful of these plants to the local nursery. “A succulent” judged the proprietor “in the same family as cactus.” But the species he could not identify, only that these plants suck water from the ground as the cactus does, although they lack the thorns that might keep them from desperately thirsty predators. No animal, bird or rodent, preyed on these succulents, no matter how vulnerable, how tender they were. As phallic as the field of mushrooms making the girls in Tess giggle, their skirts tied up. In swift propagation upon the lawn.
A green lawn says you’re home. A brown lawn says sweet home is imperiled. But a yellow, blanched-out one says here is the desolation that visits you sooner or later. Your yard labor only delays the obvious. The hermit kingdom that begins and ends as a legend in your own mind. As he looked at the dwarf pines in the back yard and beyond them the dirty chocolate lab that barked before the apartment block, the oparking lot littered with cars parked haphazardly, neither in parakllel nor in perpendicular fashion, the trucks of roofers and odd-job men he thought of the pines on the coast of Epirus, the rocky inhospitable inlets near the straits of Corfu, and the rock face above which the pines towered and barred the stranger from entering the hermit kingdom with its funny tongues, its insoluble customs and tribal divisions as mysterious to outsiders as Masonic or Eleusinian rituals, as the gold sheafs of grain decorating a lady’s throat in a jeweled sarcophagus on which the jewels have been pulled from their various sockets and clasps, he hoped his Bosnian pines would grow one day as high as those pines crowding out the quotidian accidents outside this precious border—it was the border, not the land within the vborder or the land without the border that was precious, thast indeed was what he paid for: the gate before the deserted village, nature’s gate, but it would eb years before the pines would grow beyond the size of bonsai, or the final efforts just on the treeline oif the mountainside he would shrink in their triumph against the orbits of the sun, and the disappearance of the barking of the chocolate dog and the dirty termination of the street in rubble and fieldstones—as he breathed his last, the tree-tops touched the sun that set beyond them.
Pine for October’s gothic enclosures already, valleys and overcast skies with bats swooping over the traveler’s head after sunset. Who can count how many bicycles in retrospect caromed down Academy Road during the fitful peak of day while I only watched them, a spectator at my improvised work-desk, also breakfast table. The woods were behind me. Far back a pioneer’s cabin burned down, a hermitage that could have doubled as a military barracks, so Spartan and scornful of modernity were its inhabitants, sending their sons to the foreign wars of each generation, their Protestant heritage refusing to soften before the spectacle of eastern caravans and oriental covertness and obsequies. About the deadly follies of the Asiatics, they can only sigh and hope for a swift and brutal Viking conversion, modified naturally by American-mandated tastes for consumer items, a volley of choices you are free to refuse as an individual but not to expel as a collective force. And the sons.
They ironed the kinks of bohemian inclinations from their sons at a very early date, although the inheritance was humble and the financial ties light. Any waywardness or sign of easy virtue among their daughters the mother stigmatized upon first hearing, swiftly and brutally. The women were pretty, severe and disapproving of the mores of the time, their opinions more inflexible than their spouses. They wore their hair au natural and never wore makeup, a trait that one might mistakenly associate with hippies. But now the house was gone and the remnants were in tents and storage sheds after the embers from the posts and beams had cooled in the meadow where the frost had settled.
I found a small plant, spongy with ridges as if the stem were trying to leaf but couldn’t, spread over a rock and growing in the lawn of the front yard where the grass had browned out. I brought a handful of these plants to the local nursery. “A succulent” judged the proprietor “in the same family as cactus.” But the species he could not identify, only that these plants suck water from the ground as the cactus does, although they lack the thorns that might keep them from desperately thirsty predators. No animal, bird or rodent, preyed on these succulents, no matter how vulnerable, how tender they were. As phallic as the field of mushrooms making the girls in Tess giggle, their skirts tied up. In swift propagation upon the lawn.
A green lawn says you’re home. A brown lawn says sweet home is imperiled. But a yellow, blanched-out one says here is the desolation that visits you sooner or later. Your yard labor only delays the obvious. The hermit kingdom that begins and ends as a legend in your own mind. As he looked at the dwarf pines in the back yard and beyond them the dirty chocolate lab that barked before the apartment block, the oparking lot littered with cars parked haphazardly, neither in parakllel nor in perpendicular fashion, the trucks of roofers and odd-job men he thought of the pines on the coast of Epirus, the rocky inhospitable inlets near the straits of Corfu, and the rock face above which the pines towered and barred the stranger from entering the hermit kingdom with its funny tongues, its insoluble customs and tribal divisions as mysterious to outsiders as Masonic or Eleusinian rituals, as the gold sheafs of grain decorating a lady’s throat in a jeweled sarcophagus on which the jewels have been pulled from their various sockets and clasps, he hoped his Bosnian pines would grow one day as high as those pines crowding out the quotidian accidents outside this precious border—it was the border, not the land within the vborder or the land without the border that was precious, thast indeed was what he paid for: the gate before the deserted village, nature’s gate, but it would eb years before the pines would grow beyond the size of bonsai, or the final efforts just on the treeline oif the mountainside he would shrink in their triumph against the orbits of the sun, and the disappearance of the barking of the chocolate dog and the dirty termination of the street in rubble and fieldstones—as he breathed his last, the tree-tops touched the sun that set beyond them.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Jan 19 2020 -- May 10 2010
January 10 2010 Sunday
A singing vine
A buzzing fly
And a ladybug
Collapsing itself
To a spotted dewdrop
Settled within
The waxy surface
of the lampshade
Chains that hold
the swings in air
Have not rusted
Nor has the slide
Shelter is unnatural
Upright lean-to or pagodas.
Feb. 21 Sunday
As I rode the elliptical training machine, the television played the same infomercial loop (it never ends!) for a Time-Life-Warner 60s soft rock CD. Bobby Goldsboro, whose face in digitized format underwent silvery luminescent alterations, resembled an animated corpse with a toupee. His face looked made of molded collagen suffused with an argentine, almost lunar glow beneath the wig of black, a plastic helmet with a pompadour for a visor. The most painful soft-rock songs continued to play as I treaded the elliptical. My heart-rate soared. I couldn’t find the remote. Finally, after listening to these lachrymal tunes for nearly 15 minutes of exertion, I leapt at the console to touch a button that might turn the television off as Jimmy Dean sang Big John, no one in the gym to scold or to help me. But I couldn’t turn it off or change the channel. For the second time, Herb Alpert appeared, indicating that the loop was re-beginning. And the apparition of Bobby Goldsboro appeared as well, singing Watching Scotty Grow. I bore with it another ten minutes, which recalled how much I’d recoiled from the top 40 as a youngster. A swim meet tool place in the building, all the parking spaces taken. I would book a flight to a place where this music never played.
May 9 2010 Sunday
The violets of the flowers mingled with the violets of the dusk,
The sun was setting behind the branches of the flowering shrubs,
And the head-lamps of revolving cars lit the space between the rungs
Of the park bench, and the iron fence of the park elongated into shadows
While a confounding number of footpaths lead the pedestrian
To the sidewalk of the square, whether to the City Hall steps or the post office
With its Jeffersonian dome and rotunda, or the white church,
Or to the zone for bars and restaurants, as ordained by the town council.
An ordained minister does not intervene in the tribulations of his flock,
But presides above them like the sun that sets in violet
But in vermillion rises.
****************************************
A sun has not arrived to evaporate the dew from grass that must be cut unless the lawn reverts into a field. How roots behave, clutching a sphere of soil when the weed is pulled from earth by the stem, while taproots investigate the clay.
A breeze connected to a storm-front to the west shakes the trees, shudders the grass-blades, and the saw-toothed leaves of the dandelion, which have already shed their spokes. The needles of the conifers turn brown at their tips, and the cones do not ooze sap.
A king is crowned by his people, an emperor is coronated. Once upon a time Toyota made a Corona; now only Corollas are available, the former a crown, the latter a halo, an aura about the crown. The halo’s color denotes angelic rank, a crown of thorns is abnegation, as would be one of nails. From the skull cap radiates enlightenment; never touch the pate of an oriental child, or the septum at the top of the skull.
May 10, 2010
Planted: one small Alberta spruce on a slope
Between the frayed juniper and the arbor vitae
With its already dessicated brown and orange tassels.
Many small stones, potato-shaped, or the size of walnuts.
How do the taproots of an evergreen
Find their way down, soil so inhospitable
It’s killing off a towering maple.
The towering maple is dying, its middle trunk
Hollowed out by woodpeckers and ants.
Meanwhile, the freshly mowed lawn
Doesn’t brown out.
A singing vine
A buzzing fly
And a ladybug
Collapsing itself
To a spotted dewdrop
Settled within
The waxy surface
of the lampshade
Chains that hold
the swings in air
Have not rusted
Nor has the slide
Shelter is unnatural
Upright lean-to or pagodas.
Feb. 21 Sunday
As I rode the elliptical training machine, the television played the same infomercial loop (it never ends!) for a Time-Life-Warner 60s soft rock CD. Bobby Goldsboro, whose face in digitized format underwent silvery luminescent alterations, resembled an animated corpse with a toupee. His face looked made of molded collagen suffused with an argentine, almost lunar glow beneath the wig of black, a plastic helmet with a pompadour for a visor. The most painful soft-rock songs continued to play as I treaded the elliptical. My heart-rate soared. I couldn’t find the remote. Finally, after listening to these lachrymal tunes for nearly 15 minutes of exertion, I leapt at the console to touch a button that might turn the television off as Jimmy Dean sang Big John, no one in the gym to scold or to help me. But I couldn’t turn it off or change the channel. For the second time, Herb Alpert appeared, indicating that the loop was re-beginning. And the apparition of Bobby Goldsboro appeared as well, singing Watching Scotty Grow. I bore with it another ten minutes, which recalled how much I’d recoiled from the top 40 as a youngster. A swim meet tool place in the building, all the parking spaces taken. I would book a flight to a place where this music never played.
May 9 2010 Sunday
The violets of the flowers mingled with the violets of the dusk,
The sun was setting behind the branches of the flowering shrubs,
And the head-lamps of revolving cars lit the space between the rungs
Of the park bench, and the iron fence of the park elongated into shadows
While a confounding number of footpaths lead the pedestrian
To the sidewalk of the square, whether to the City Hall steps or the post office
With its Jeffersonian dome and rotunda, or the white church,
Or to the zone for bars and restaurants, as ordained by the town council.
An ordained minister does not intervene in the tribulations of his flock,
But presides above them like the sun that sets in violet
But in vermillion rises.
****************************************
A sun has not arrived to evaporate the dew from grass that must be cut unless the lawn reverts into a field. How roots behave, clutching a sphere of soil when the weed is pulled from earth by the stem, while taproots investigate the clay.
A breeze connected to a storm-front to the west shakes the trees, shudders the grass-blades, and the saw-toothed leaves of the dandelion, which have already shed their spokes. The needles of the conifers turn brown at their tips, and the cones do not ooze sap.
A king is crowned by his people, an emperor is coronated. Once upon a time Toyota made a Corona; now only Corollas are available, the former a crown, the latter a halo, an aura about the crown. The halo’s color denotes angelic rank, a crown of thorns is abnegation, as would be one of nails. From the skull cap radiates enlightenment; never touch the pate of an oriental child, or the septum at the top of the skull.
May 10, 2010
Planted: one small Alberta spruce on a slope
Between the frayed juniper and the arbor vitae
With its already dessicated brown and orange tassels.
Many small stones, potato-shaped, or the size of walnuts.
How do the taproots of an evergreen
Find their way down, soil so inhospitable
It’s killing off a towering maple.
The towering maple is dying, its middle trunk
Hollowed out by woodpeckers and ants.
Meanwhile, the freshly mowed lawn
Doesn’t brown out.
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