From 6/4-6/5/11

I hear the washer churn, and hear the birds sing too. Some sing in tight explosive outbursts of melody, others sing in declining repetitive patterns (as I wrote this last sentence, my ballpoint pen flew apart, the spring propelling the clip to fly from the inkwell). And hear crickets in between the sounds of birds.

In my old garden I vied with red slugs who killed the crop until I filled the lid of a microwavable container with Narragansett, positioning it among the rosebushes one evening to find upon the following afternoon that the method had only worked too well—the slugs drowned in the lid had half-dissolved, leaving a slimy, gelatinous mass inside, a mass that I threw away with great care with repellence. No wonder that among the birds and beasts they have no predators, not even crows touching them.

The two green peppers I plucked had ripened to a stage in which red was admixed with green until they nearly made a third color neither brown nor the medium among all three. The color of dirt or feces does not appear upon the spectrum anymore than the amber color of this plywood board I use for writing in this dull green of a chair of an almost corduroy fabric the wales of which are sun-bleached and threadbare, like the furniture in the studio of an alcoholic painter whose skylight is smoky from dust and tobacco stains. And the sofa in the studio is likewise dusty and almost threadbare as the comforter on the sofa is bleached from the sun through the skylight. Still-life? More Nature morte. None of these dull or sun-bleached colors or colors faded from the fabric to which they were attached appears on the spectrometer either. But everyday life isn’t as vivid as the devices by which the visual and its brightness is measured and conveyed. Few too much slips between the cracks for the spectrum to capture in its calibration of brightness.

Persistence is often the endless application of the burin to no good end.
A burin can burn through the marks you made before back to the nothing behind every inscription.

From 6/5

It’s from the highest of the dead trees
So stripped of bark by now
I can’t tell what kind of tree it was
That the songbird lets go
His most compressed melodic outbursts,
Envy of flautists and woodwind players.
From where he’s most exposed
To sky-predators, the sharp-shinned hawks,
He sings the most, as if all depended on his song,
Although he sings from a dead tree-top,
All blasted from above to the very roots
On which the carpenter ants climb
To start colonies. How soon
Do you think they take
To corrupt the tree, bring it down?
The songbird does not need to know
How devils hide behind the details.
Besides, the details are all below.
He feeds on some of them himself
For the time and chance to sing above them.

***

For once, I said, I’m going to hang my clothes, not pack them in the dryer, as clunky as some Victorian machine of transport, a machine that bores tunnels for the old steam trains, for the cast-iron boilers to glide through. There is a light at the end of this tunnel where the clothes are dried, as if they’d hung on the clothesline shaking off their colors as the wind takes them -- those are the trade winds I believe, that pick up the ships. They will deliver the goods to the steam trains with the cast iron boilers fired up to go through the tunnel bored by the same tumbling Victorian machine that recalls the dryer that bores to light at the end of the tunnel in which the self-same clothes are clean albeit a little faded. And through the space the dryer made a smell of light from the clean clothes lifts, becomes alas aloft.

***

The caveman tires of the sight of his hand-prints
Impressed upon the rough calcites of that cave wall.
So with his paint-sticks he carves out a trapezoid,
Then the little squares inside the first trapezoid.
Soon the new piece begins to resemble a game board
For which the caveman lacks pieces and the understanding
Of the rules behind the new game,
Nothing like this can he see in all nature
Sprawled outside his cave, no trapezoids,
No squares found inside them. The squares
He idly engraves came from boredom
Between invoking the shadowy bestiaries of the ceiling,
The spotted cows, the thick-maned stallions,
The wooly bison with delicate nimble feet.
[The delicate nimbly-footed wooly bison.]

***

Holes in the lawn patched with new seedling,
not sink-holes as in Guatemala,
So deep as to cause incredulity.
Cats roaming the yard but never finding prey.
The lilacs have dried up into brown bunches.
By their long taproots I pull sumac,
by their fuzzy leaves the mullein,
before it can tower eerily by this rough access road.
I shovel carefully so as not to upstir
The animal spirits beneath.
Cats glide by to fishing grounds or games.
But it’s words that separate the hand from the plough.