- Bloodroot is blooming.
- For all the cumulative hours over years I've spent in woods, and all I want to do is hike with Earthgirl, when I see a deer I hear the word deer, when I see this white flower that blooms in Maryland woods in April I chime in recognition rather than hear its name.
- The life in and beneath the trees, life at my feet, what does each call itself? I never needed to know.
- I've seen the above flower every year in April on Maryland trails for x many years and never knew until yesterday humans speaking English call it bloodroot.
- I paid Apple $4 for an app, point and shoot, facial plant recognition, used once, the fuck?
- I ruin every fucking thing.
- The other death.
- Dissecting the madness of economic reason.
- I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
- Deleted conversation from Friday past w the most persistent Hillarialist of my Hillaryite Colleagues.
- A drive throught northwest Afghanistan.
- Maggie's weekly links.
- A denatured humanism.
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- Robert Coover interview (found looking for something else at Numero Cinq (which seems to be dead) this morning, I was thinking about Coover's Brunist Day of Wrath, which I read last summer in Maine, yesterday while hiking, I've thought about it every day since finishing).
- If you buy and read Coover's Origin of the Brunists (find it for a buck at a used book online store) and like it and ask me nice I'll buy you Brunist Day of Wrath cause you need read the first before the second.
MUSICA RESERVATA
John Ashbery
Then I reached the field and I thought
this is not a joke not a book
but a poem about something—but what?
Poems are such odd little jiggers.
This one scratches himself, gets up, then goes off to
pee
in a corner of the room. Later looking quite
stylish in white jodhpurs against the winter
snow, and in his reluctance to talk to the utterly
discursive: “I will belove less than feared ...”
He trotted up, he trotted down, he trotted all around the
town.
Were his relatives jealous of him?
Still the tock-tock machinery lies half-embedded in
sand.
Someone comes to the window, the wave is a gesture proving
nothing,
and nothing has receded. One gets caught
in servants like these and must lose the green leaves,
one by one, as an orchard is pilfered, and then, with
luck,
nuggets do shine, the baited trap slides open.
We are here with our welfare intact.
Oh but another time, on the resistant edge of night
one thinks of the pranks things are.
What led the road that sped underfoot
to oases of disaster, or at least the unknown?
We are born, buried for a while, then spring up just
as
everything is closing. Our desires are extremely
simple:
a glass of purple milk, for example, or a dream
of being in a restaurant. Waiters encourage us, and
squirrels.
There’s no telling how much of us will get used.
My friend devises the cabbage horoscope
that points daily to sufficiency. He and all those others go
home.
The walls of this room are like Mykonos, and sure
enough,
green plumes toss in the breeze outside
that underscores the stillness of this place
we never quite have, or want. Yet it’s wonderful, this
being; to point to a tree and say don’t I know you
from somewhere?
Sure, now I remember, it was in some landscape
somewhere,
and we can all take off our hats.
At night when it’s too cold
what does the rodent say to the glass shard?
What are any of us doing up? Oh but there’s
a party, but it too was a dream. A group of boys
was singing my poetry, the music was an anonymous
fifteenth-century Burgundian anthem, it went something like
this:
“This is not what you should hear,
but we are awake, and days
with donkey ears and packs negotiate
the narrow canyon trail that is
as white and silent as a dream,
that is, something you dreamed.
And resources slip away, or are pinned
under a ladder too heavy to lift.
Which is why you are here, but the mnemonics
of the ride are stirring.”
That, at least, is my hope.