Music & Internment

 Every sentence is the result of a long probation.

                        –  HD Thoreau

"o" like a bird singing, just for itself

Two Early Inventions

• Groundlings and mandarins
• Hatchlings from the high blue hat

Seven Words into Part One of Thomas Browne's Christian Morals

The word "funambulatory."

Like a silver thread through a laughing key.

Toward a Ruderal Sublime

Rooted out –– what remains is to our delight.

Emerson, on Depletion

Our moods do not believe in each other.

Radio Narration on South Africa

"We are giving you this mobile phone so you can be honest about your lives."

Elsewhere, Adorno speaks of a "language without soil."

The Defiant Ones

Cara Williams suffers the eternal present:

"All my life I've been waitin' to get away from here. From the mud gumbo and the loneliness."

Elsewhere, Adorno speaks of a "language without soil."

Stevens, the lighthouse.

"We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold."

13 Lines on Smallness, from Lucretius

How small can anything be? We know of creatures
So tiny they would seem to disappear
If they were less than half their present size.
How big do you suppose their livers are?
Their hearts? The pupils of their eyes? Their toes?
Pretty minute, you must admit. Well, then,
What about things like those atomic motes
That form the elements of mind and spirit?
Diminutive, to say the least. Nor can we
Find with our finger tips the cause of smell
That clings there from the touch of marigold,
Centaury, heal-all, wormwood, southernwood.
So images move beyond our powers of sight.

Longfellow's Visitors

"A German woman, with a strong accent, called to talk to him about 'The Building of the Ship,' which she was planning to read in public, and which she called 'The Lunch of the Sheep.'"

Line by Elias Canetti

What can be told without great impudence?

Line by Steve Malmude

Any joy is adequate, 'parting hero'.

More Manners

"Those who like their discourses what used to be called 'marrowy' (ie, denunciatory of the opposition) will seek vainly for what they want in Browne."

Peradventurer's Concordance, Book of Genesis

• 18:24 Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city 
• 18:28 Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous
• 18:29 and said, Peradventure there shall be forty found
• 18:30 I will speak: Peradventure there shall thirty be found
• 18:31 unto the LORD: Peradventure there shall be twenty found 
• 18:32 speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found
• 24:5 said unto him, Peradventure the woman will not be willing
• 24:39 unto my master, Peradventure the woman will not follow
• 27:12 My father peradventure will feel me, and I shall seem
• 31:31 for I said, Peradventure thou wouldest take by force
• 32:20 will see his face; peradventure he will accept of me
• 38:11 be grown: for he said, Lest peradventure he die also
• 42:4 for he said, Lest peradventure mischief befall him
• 43:12 again in your hand; peradventure it was an oversight
• 44:34 with me? lest peradventure I see the evil that shall come
• 50:15 dead, they said, J–– will peradventure hate us, and will 

Ashbery's Birthday

Because life is short
We must remember to keep asking it the same question

   ––"The New Spirit", Three Poems

Limitations

"Bees can remember human faces, but only if they are tricked into thinking that we are strange flowers."

––Harpers Findings, 7.20.10

Readings

"A content affirmation exercise."

Somewhere between irony and forbearance, Steven Farmer turns the perfect phrase to describe the persistent value arbitration within contemporary poetry.

Such valence for this literature that refuses to initialize its variables.

Observations in Books

"One sits and is carried into the remote unknown. How well-off I am, really!"

––R Walser, The Little Berliner