OK, Full Disclosure, I've Never Been on a Peach Farm, Just Glimpsed from a Car Squat Trees I Assumed Were Peach

• I finished Josipovici's Infinity: The Story of a Moment, a novel, as the back page says, loosely based on the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, and Josipovici then thank(s) the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi, Rome, for permission to incorporate fragments from Scelsi's own writings into the narrative. It's going to take at lifetime more readings - which will commence in 2016 and each successive year as long as my eyes work - to unfold and then refold the origami. This is only the second novel of Josipovici's Ive read (both in the past two months). Friends have urged him on me for years. OK, I'm in. Qualifying sentences for a reason - I'm prone to sweeping statements, I want to emphasize this is a speculative observation, not a dictate. Still, as someone who was trained by education and trained by secular faith in the innate progress and goodness of The Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, modernism and post-modernism, and who is only in the recent past begun to interrogate the assumptions of that faith and to consider repercussions of that faith I never examined, I find Josipovici asks the right questions I am only in the stages of formulating.
• Infinity: The Story of a Moment is also a magnificent bleggalgaze in all it's probing of bullshit and autobiography. And the riffs on classical music made me laugh out loud.
• Scelsi has been posted here before, click the tag, yo.
• Love Songs: on Gaza.
• Old Tom Clark.
• The adventures and punitive expeditions of fascist Pinocchio.
• Maigret's Jurisdiction.
• On hiding.
• Wondering whether he should write something about Taylor Swift.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• RIP Steve Strange.
• Robert Creeley, for those of you who do, those of you who should.
• He never sang to me, no doubt it's my fault, but RIP Philip Levine.

PEACH FARM

Dean Young

I’m thinking it’s time to go back

to the peach farm or rather

the peach farm seems to be wanting me back

even though the work of picking, sorting,

the sticky perils and sudden swarms are done.

Okay, full disclosure, I’ve never

been on a peach farm, just glimpsed

from a car squat trees I assumed

were peach and knew a couple in school

who went off one summer, so they said,

to work on a peach farm. She was pregnant,

he didn’t have much intention, canvases

of crushed lightbulbs and screws in paste.

He’d gotten fired from the lunch counter

for putting too much meat

on the sandwiches of his friends

then ended up in Macy’s in New York

selling caviar and she went home

I think to Scranton, two more versions

of never hearing from someone again.

I’d like to say the most important fruits

are within but that’s the very sort of bullshit

one goes to the peach farm to avoid,

not just flight from quadratic equations,

waiting for the plumber,

finding out your insurance won’t pay.

Everyone wants out of the spider’s stomach.

Everyone wants to be part of some harvest

and stop coughing to death and cursing

at nothing and waking up nowhere near

an orchard. Look at these baskets,

bashed about, nearly ruined with good employ.

Often, after you’ve spent a day on a ladder,

you dream of angels, the one with the trumpet

and free subscriptions to the New Yorker

or the archer, the oink angel, angel

of ten dollar bills found in the dryer

or the one who welcomes you in work gloves

and says if you’re caught eating a single peach,

even windfall, you’ll be executed.

Then laughs. It’s okay, kiddo,

long as you’re here, you’re one of us.