Thorns and the route they take

SAGUAROS 


They look battered and friction-worn, although

they never go

anywhere, but stand for a century or two

as if playing statue 

out in the humorless sun

and the cold-faced moon. Their fun

is sombre fun, clumsy fun, without a word.

The hummingbird 

and the cactus wren

inhabit their thorny mockery of men,

each miming gesture

slightly unprecedented in Nature.

Their melancholy individuality

spells death to me;
their skeletons outlast their flesh, as with us,                               

        and as in many a howling congregation

        their arms lift up in surrender or supplication.

Mute mobs of them throng the desert dusk. 

                                                              —John Updike

Night Thistle

The Girls' College 

Yesterday I was invited by Mark Slonim (the most famous expert on Russian literature in America, and he also teaches Italian: I had met him in Rome) to ... where he teaches comparative literature. [It] is a very chic girls' college, where each girl chooses the course she wants, there are no lectures just discussions, no exams, in short everyone has a great time dealing with pleasant and varied cultural topics. Girls in trousers and big socks and multicolored jerseys, just like in films about college life, flutter down from the buildings where they have their faculty rooms and dormitories. Lunch is very meagre because in any case the girls want to keep their figure (while the starving tutors protest). ... I read, translate and give a commentary on St Francis to the various Beths, Virginias, Joans. And since their teacher has dropped a timid hint that she prefers D'Annunzio, I rebel and produce a lengthy eulogy putting St Francis above all other poets. I realize that this is the first time since coming to America that I have explained anything or defended an idea. And it had to be St Francis. Very appropriate (41-42). 

The Stranger (La Extranjera)


She speaks in her way of her savage seas

With unknown algae and unknown sands;

She prays to a formless, weightless God,

Aged, as if dying.

In our garden now so strange,

She has planted cactus and alien grass.

The desert zephyr fills her with its breath

And she has loved with a fierce, white passion

She never speaks of, for if she were to tell

It would be like the face of unknown stars.

Among us she may live for eighty years,

Yet always as if newly come,

Speaking a tongue that plants and whines

Only by tiny creatures understood.

And she will die here in our midst
One night of utmost suffering,
With only her fate as a pillow,
And death, silent and strange.             -Gabriela Mistral

Visual Purple

Kallisto



a senryu sequence


Sequins and draping 
trends cement this, a substance-- 
double-starred, dark hair 


In a photo shoot 
rather than hemorrhage
in the dense ilex 


Still. As her snares go
She is like the grinning bear,
forgets her last meal.

Winged Cupid Holding up a Hand-Glass-- Vitrum / Visus

Double Tetractys: Tetracycline labeling of bone

Bone
Double
Dosage of
Fluorescent tags
Measure the distance, a newly-formed mold.
Two points a ten day gap lights in blacklight.
A gaze, growth
Sequestered
Where it

Shows.

The Exploded Necklace Analysand

"It was strange she should have told him not to be afraid of Frank because it was she Harold had always been afraid of. Any vulgarity that could not be paid off and dismissed intimidated him. 

...

Already there was a crease at the front of her ankles, and the flesh of her upper arms was loose, and her hips had a girdled hardness. Not that Harold did not find her attractive. He did, and this went with his fright. Her beauty seemed a gift she would abuse, like a boy with a gun, or squander, like a fool with a fortune. She struck him as a bad investor who would buy high and sell after the drop and take everybody she could down with her. So he walked, up Milk, through the thick of Boston's large codger population, along Tremont, through the Common and the Public Garden, in a pinching mood of caution. The sidewalk was so hot it stung through the soles of his thin black Italianate shoes; yet scraps of velour and highlights of satiny white skin skated through his head, and it was somewhat romantic of him not to have taken a cab" (118-119).

"And Danny Skinner had flown back into town feeling more disorientated than ever. For the entire flight he was thinking about Dorothy, the traumatic tearfulness of their departure at San Francisco airport shocking them both in its intensity. His mind danced with the wonderful possibilities and cruel improbabilities of a long-term, long-distance romance. But his quest was incomplete. Greg Tomlin had been removed from the list, but he knew that his mother had been in some kind of relationship. While it warmed his heart to think that he might have been the product of a real, if fleeting, love, rather than a cider-and-speed fuck, he couldn't bring himself to confront her again, at least for the time being. De Fretais was the one he wanted.

When he got back to his cold flat in Leith, he switched on the central heating, then took some sleeping pills and knocked himself out. The next day he called Bob Foy, finding out that De Fretais was currently filming in Germany. The next person he phoned was Joyce Kibby and he was still jet-lagged when her met her for a coffee in the St John's café in Corstorphine" (281). 

Says the Sun to the Moon

No, your maneuver to clutter me in series of seminars and a final publication
Was never smaller by your middling authority and relentless, western move. 
No match for my dark unheeding. An affront to your convenience, anyway.
I will make my arrows resolve for crying to some overphotographed country
Minus the lap pool and palm shadows. Where you, regularly drunk on the back 
Porch, resume the controls. Your vision leaving behind the paper house, black


Walnut half-acre. Plot raked in uneven waves, they say three moves in the black
Equal one fire. Burn with autumn leaves, the seemingly indifferent publications
I gave you or compost to fill in the holes. The line of scrimmage behind as I back 
Doorways into another. But enough, the big, black footprints of your last move
Dignify the useful life, and a meal well-disposed. Your remove to the country
Past the countryway store serving breakfast, pizza. A radioactive subsoil anyway


For you. Armed with the lofty science, lotus position, and questioning an out anyway
You could. Dressing well for official appearances, you know how to answer in the black
Tone you are addressed. And in some private furor redolent to your nose the country 
Became your reading material, some rusted connivance of a wellspring in publications 
Gathered in the auditor's pose. Abashedly, only the part I did not make myself moved.
Clambered in constant vague expectation, broke into love on overburdened ligaments back


Down the mountain, submitting to a curfew. A tree emptied of its birds, the wind backed

The fell naturalist. My bowels went cold, stealing to a desk for something longed for, anyway
And since then long forgotten. Leaves fanned out, where planes of the picture were free to move
On the neck of this like two infatuated courtiers avoiding all possible run-ins or black 
Asides of the goat, leaning his bulk. You left off the artichokes if to sponsor this publication
The hypnosis induced by all things in their time even when you are a part and parcel of country.


I shed a skin, while a student of Latin in his limping years indulges rank and rind of the country
Rich cheese unpressed for the unthankful town. I may have thought that an abrupt farewell back
To the halfhearted housekeeping you have shown. What grows in front of me was water, publication
With the content publicly known, how to regret a phase of life that throws description any way
I choose. Dissected tableland of the bills, a touch is to fear the varnish as it hardens, blackens   
With age. With dinner and dog waiting the adagio of his return, you darken your door. Pride moves


You, too. So that he is fulfilled and doesn't stray. You were no more than twenty-two when moved
To wear a man's shirt, no less smooth the collar of this man, whose size has tripled in this country.
Could you not withdraw deeper in your meaning to destroy everything with sharper corners? Blackness
In whom one sleeps, not the foundered marriages they were to. A change of name or revert back
Stills the shining morning with unclogged pores with a ghost of the moon. Plant fall bulbs any way,
Let them swell like the bulbs of your eyes. The vision meant nothing to you, and the publication

Lapsed with little unknown. I was no more than twenty-two when moved to publication
When it seemed like a path to choose in this country. I can lose this symptom or revert back to
It when I want, meaning to destroy everything of yours that I still own, until even memory is black.

 



   

Pirarucu in a Pool

A tour of collage, your tail ends in red like a burn.


The log canoe barked backwards for your slaughter, an arrogance repaid
with the hard architecture of the refuge.

To me, you are a work of art.

Fingercuffed

blind contour exercise

Reading and writing in the right proportions of echoes.

Florida in January


The cold of winter is somehow colder here,
the trees bleaker, with their rags of Spanish moss,
the very air clipped and impatient.
You wouldn't realize summer's forest,
so much like New England, grew in a mattress of marsh
until the leaves were down . Beneath the second growth
a low fringe of starved palmettos
lives in short, childlike arcs, their palest greens
worn almost to the color of old dollar bills. 
In rye field and feed lots,
amid the swaying, wheezing cattle
lost to their mute philosophies,
stalk our self-important tourists, the sandhill cranes--
Nature's aristocrats, eye flared with red eye-shadow
(carelessly applied, as if without a mirror),
their jaunty icepick heads eager or greedy,
but their bodies delicately boned, like young ballerinas.
They high-step away in virginal unease.


Nothing repairs the indifference of their veering,
neither the storm casting its tattered cloak
over the sand pines, nor egrets huddled
against the lake's border, folded up like origami paper,
nor the water, sullen, pocked and greasy,
a rusting tintype of our latent democratic vistas,
Like Ovid on the Black Sea, the restless stranger
might feel such cruel beauty monotonous.
But, inshore, a crusty alligator steams,
nosing into reeds to let off passengers
or take on canvas sacks of mail,
as if the weather had never once been tender
or required, like love, a moment of surrender.

Friday, October 9 is her birthday