(no subject)

Sestina, Bishop

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

(no subject)

Guiltily reading Walden for the first time - consecutively - and actually annotating it. I'm loving most of it, but he's almost as disorganized as Emerson; a bit to his detriment, too, as he's less consistently memorable and burying his gold in a book-length work. Emerson's disorganization is usually a strength, permitting not just digression but discovery. And rediscovery, toward the end. I hate the word 'leitmotif' but it's not dissimilar to the peak effects in Tristan. Maybe Thoreau will get some of that going himself as the book progresses?

Only one perfect paragraph so far (1/3 in), the one I already knew was perfect:

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

The bird disappearing behind a cloud I happen to know he will use again.

The house sections of "Economy" and "How I Lived" do connect to the magnificent passage near the end of "Walking", to me still his greatest moment - so far. I wonder if he's just pretending to not be organizing. How good is Thoreau? I don't yet know. If he's like Chekhov he'll keep flooding out my estimates no matter how I update them.

(no subject)

Hadn't noticed till recently that the child's drawing in Bishop's Sestina is similar to that game Crowley uses in Love and Sleep and that I tried out myself a few years ago:

http://proximoception.livejournal.com/133459.html

Perhaps a variation on Crowley's cup and key - or some original he gnosticized? Something like, "Picture a house. Now picture a path to the house. Now picture a man. [...] That's where you came from; that's what your life will be like; that's how it'll feel." I could never convince my thesis advisors how bleak Bishop is. Loveliest possible bleakness. She must have found it lovely too, or striven to find angles from which to. I think they must have thought I meant despairing? That's something different. That's an absence of hope you spray on people.

"As if the story of a house were told or ever could be." Houses that don't quite exist and don't quite not are central in Crowley, Bishop, Stevens, Frost, Robinson, Thoreau. Whitman, by negation - a carpenter taking the wall down. Must be part of that American thing, that solitude. Former American thing? Pre-cellphone & internet? This mania for full disclosure, which I'd say has done a lot of undeniable good as well as undeniable stupid, might only be possible in the wake of a long, consuming solitariness.

But when people talk about America they usually just mean the world. Sometimes it's chauvinism and sometimes it's a polite hesitancy. "Perhaps they order these things differently in China..." Probably not.