(no subject)

I'll miss our driveway - ours and several neighbors' -
Which travels several hundred yards, all pine
On one side, then a lake crossed by a freeway,
A ditch and landscaped patches gone to seed
On the other side. Our subdivision's stillborn,
Construction having stopped around the time
The global economy slumped. Some units never
Were occupied, and most are empty now
On our block, in the back. The driveway's called
"Frontage Road" but there's no buildings on it,
And I don't know what it could ever have fronted,
But it must have been for something, since it goes
So very far. Only our block has access,
The bad block at the back, where nobody
Takes in their garbage after it's removed.

(This road's closed off to cars beyond my house
And dies away in woods beside the freeway
People dispose of old paint on the pavement
Before it fades to weeds - where there's a sofa.)

I'll miss it not because it's long and curves,
And not because on rainy evenings frogs
Hop up and down the length - you have to dodge them
Most carefully when driving, though they glare white
When lights are on them - but because I love
How at the end behind another row
Of similarly similar houses another lake
Appears, a strip of lake, so far away,
For just a second as you turn to the road.
A bit of faraway in the here and now.
The things around you block out all the others,
Is one of the problems being around things.
That hole reminds me not to trust what's near,
Or at least to trust that everything else is still out there,
However invisible most of the time. You pass
The lake you see a bit of from the driveway
If you turn right onto the road - you see it all,
But I've never figured out which bit it is
That peeps at us for a second there at the end.

(no subject)

Goethe in a letter, on his son's grave:

After a few days he was carried to his rest near the Pyramid of Cestius, in the place his father used to long for in poetic dreams before he was born.

He mentions these longings in Roman Elegy 7 (sometimes 9), where he's thankful to be in Rome and hopes to die there:

Here put up with me, Jove, and let Hermes escort me down later, / Past the Cestian tomb, softly to Orcus below. (Hamburger)

And in Italian Journey:

The poems on Hans Sachs and on Mieding's death conclude the eighth volume, and so, for the present, my writings. If in the meantime I am laid to rest next to the pyramid, these two poems can serve as my biographical data and funeral oration.

In a 1788 letter:

Some evenings ago when I was melancholic I drew [my grave] by Cestius' pyramid.

Drawing:

(no subject)

While I'm in a visual mood, here's the landscape I liked at the Met. The Met's own site does the most justice to it (though not much) because of the zoom tool. Click on the painting to enlarge first.

http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/european_paintings/wheat_fields_jacob_van_ruisdael/objectview_enlarge.aspx?page=22&sort=0&sortdir=asc&keyword=&fp=1&dd1=11&dd2=0&vw=1&collID=11&OID=110002002&vT=1&hi=0&ov=0

The point is the cloud shadows, which seem startlingly lifelike and animate in person, and ominous, and the tiny mother protecting her tiny child. Safety and danger. The healthy and normal world so vast and fragile. The dark invasions silent, unguessable, unfightable, innocent. Passing the same as they come.