Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Analect 2.152x



14 August 2007. Gray clouds against hills to the east, dark birds wheeling. Image of the dry shores of Lake Superior--gray newspaper text. Lamplight inside, on a gray morning. There on the thick Columbia Encyclopedia, poems of Larry Levis. Tessellated pastel cover--a painting, maybe, or the overall pattern on low-end linoleum. Elizabeth Murray, Winter Stars...

And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then.
I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings,
The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection
Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy.

(from Larry Levis, The Poet at Seventeen)

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