AutumnDrawing29

31 October 2006. Layers of gray, all across the sky... Bumpy row of orange plastic pumpkins strung from pool desk window...eerie cheer. Table with full harvest--a vestige, but still affecting. Pumpkin, corn, squash... autumn light. B's poem on Fred Garel--Ethical Culture, the Catholic Worker--a true chassid. We cross the boundaries--all imagined--to reach out.

Un hombre verdadero...

AutumnDrawing28

27 October 2006. October sun, warm morning...making copy of the alef-beis from front of old siddur--pale yellow cover with rounded corners--even more rounded now with age. Strip of translucent brown packing tape down the spine, trimmed neatly at top and bottom. The delight--again--of Wallace Berman show--his circle of friends, really--Los Angeles and San Francisco, each with one of Berman's photographs--marvelous--a revelation, really--time as moment and eternity. Jess in sweater, having abandoned Los Alamos. Robert Duncan with notebook and pen--Edmund Teske's face--and his own mysterious photos. All elements coincide, all facts are one...

AutumnDrawing27

26 October 2006. This is fall--bright sun, whirling leaves. Indian girl with dark dark face, mystery eyes--in the evening, chair in the open hallway, feet propped on stool, reading. Book of hindu gods--ancient stone, rounded forms, each element intertwined. "I like the cover...," red and white pattern on textured muslin--run your hand over it--an entire world made present... Amin Maalouf...his novel about Omar Khayyam--Samarkand. Persia of old--also intertwining, but more edge and filigree. A different sense--the desert, maybe--or that particular light--Shiraz, Tabriz, the paintings of Bihzad...

AutumnDrawing26

24 October 2006. Gray sandhill cranes--silhouetted against the dun-colored fields. Stands of water--rice, wheat, barley--stubble of late fall, waiting for the winter rains. An impromptu dance--two of them, alight on long spindly legs. Furrows and ponds. Blackbirds as well--by the hundred, lined up into the wind on empty miles of wire. Even the name is vacant: Ten Mile Road, one straight man-made line, hard by the Mokolumne...

Georgiana Slough...

AutumnDrawing25

20 October 2006. Again, fall sun...possibility. Dad would turn 100 today: Mozyr, Minskiye Guberniye, 1906...

Last night: Nathaniel's drawings--on the verge. Also possibility. A playful and dreamy fullness--we learn this way just who we are. Later: the Russian musician--along the lines of Bulat Okudzhava--but more comfortable. Reliving those years. (The "human" song, Clara told us.) Gypsy accompaniment--mournful but also knowing--never ending on a wrong note--in this untrue. But be generous: at the end of he evening, two young girls with their mom's thick black Chinese hair--at the piano, dying to join in... Clementina, Bach, avid little faces. He holds the guitar with a chord in place, so the older girl can move her fingers across the strings...

Osher. Begin again...