Analects 2.144x

30 July 2007. White truck blocks sky, blue above... Line of double rivets along top, same but zig-zagged down below. Chamfered trim--a bit of aluminum--otherwise clear. Then, a humble roar, slowly rolling away... This is it, luck of the draw--a Mercedes emblem, upright falcon, in gray dawn light. Pelerin-- same word, but fierce with color. Swooping down out of clear blue, honest, intent...

We sometimes don't want to know...

Analects 2.142x

27 July 2007. Gray all the way, slight chill in the air, heading into November... Yesterday: column of fog in the distance, pouring over Marin hills and across the bay. Shifty forms of city lost in the distance. Evening before: walk with Loren and Libbe after supper, down road to bridge. Manzanita and madrone, California white oak, sparse stands of pine. Red twists of fire-wood pulled around shaft of conifer--a pinned embrace, digging in through the bark, the two trees become one. Something drawable, yes, that connection--like Loren's narrow splines embedded in the trunk--bridging checks and fissures, linking across, worked down to round face of wood, burnished, until the two materials are joined, absolute, imperfect...

Analects 2.141x

23 July 2007. Gray everywhere dawn, sound of gray doves under the eaves, lapping gray edges of pool. The Chinese painters began with the eye--always the eye--center of the universe in the eye of a bird. Sandhill cranes, gathered by the thousands in delta fields, late autumn light, furrows half-submerged... Zywot Mateusza...Life of Mateusz, "o duszy dziecka...," on the soul of a child...

Insistent voices now just behind, insistent stories, too-details of the neighborhood, also insistent. A busy-body, that's the word. Shopping cart filled with papers, cans, caps, bottles, all insistent--noise of the town, a discordant mottle...an insistent smile...

Villon, Po Chü-i, Tu Fu...

Analect 2.140x

20 July 2007. Clear skies, light breeze. Whoosh of cars rushing up the hill. Last night: terribly insistent tremble, then a strong bump--pronounced in conclusion, ojalá... All lying awake... Cast together in a state of no return, across the North African litoral, Abd al-Rahman--a migration, beginning with one. Life of the pilgrim...

Mongolian ponies--Przewalski again, wandering the Gobi in search of this creature of fable. A Polish nobleman, from the Kresy--Smolensk--he crossed the Dzungarian wastes, all the way to Beijing, then up the Yangtze and into Tibet. Over the Tian Shan...

Bactrian camels, and a gazelle...the equus ferus, too...

Analect 2.139x

19 July 2007. Sunny, with a few clouds, warm dusky grays tinged with rose, all along the hills. Propitious dawn. Tiny silver aeroplane reads even brighter against the southern sky--heading somewhere east. As in Xanadu, perhaps, or not quite that far, "down to a sunless sea..." Certainly not Olivia Newton John--that was then, granddaughter of Max Born, from the König Wilhelm gymnasium at Breslau, then Heidelberg, Zurich, Göttigen...Chicago, even. But Brooklyn no, Travolta's pals--white polyester and in-line skates...a row of leg-warmers...

The lonely Appaloosa, Montana plains, thunderstorms and snow...

Analect 2.138x

18 July 2008. Ring of gray mist encircling Albany hill, rain in the night--small drops, each sound each leaf. Wet grasses, and the news in two blue wraps... Pelerinage: Jeanne d'Arc and the marsh hare--Erasmus, apparently, "wilder in the marshes..." More alert than wild--attentive, even. As in reading--a book, an essay, a letter...or looking out onto the sea, where glassy swells nudge each other all the way to the horizon, crest and trough, crest and trough... The wind has dropped, water like burnished oil, moment of dusk, sun pushing towards a finale--a luminous orange globe moving past the edge of the world...

Analect 2.137x

17 July 2007. Gray morning, mist on the hills, illuminated just a little along top--hint of sun. A father and daughter, walking, he's dark-skinned, a dusky umber, in soft green cotton. Hand in hand, with black and white puppy on long leash. Loomis truck now, pale in color, rumbling past, heading up the hill, miniature American flag cocked at an angle on driver's door. Everything with its own meaning.

Al-Andalus. Cities with gardens--the Guadalquivir. Al-wadi al-kabir, Arabic of course. The Alhambra--al-humra, red, color of the clay. Umayyad, Abbasid, Moravid...El Cid--old-line crusaders. A library of 400,000 volumes--in Córdoba--watered gardens, while they lasted. An openness, unseemly, curious, grand...

Analect 2.136x

16 July 2007. Gray morning, mansard roof across the way, intermittent puffs of white disappearing against a luminous sky. But let's not overdo it here--we're talking dry cleaning establishment, after all, and the humble 7-eleven. Humble, why not. Like the cockle shell of St. James--coquilles St. Jacques--emblem of pilgrims along the entire route. Worn on the sleeve or carried, sometimes, as in the standing figure from Rothenburg, carved of wood, one leg stretched forward from under a long garment, a small water flask at the belt, staff in one hand, and in the other--a cockle shell. "Go forth with your palms upward," he said to Kristi--a pilgrim also, of her very own faith. And what is faith, after all, but something our very own...

Analect 2.135x

13 July 2007. Expanse of blue sky, end to end, a Greek island morning--Aegeo--soft sound of water lapping at the edges of the quay. A single figure, dressed in a suit, sitting at a small table right there by the sea. He's reading--a paper, it seems--something from Athens, Piraeus, Marseilles. Morning light--you can tell by the shadows, the freshness of the water, the translucence... A beginning, quiet, open-ended...

Jamaican man, also by the sea, sitting on the sand. He knows he's being filmed--looking right into the camera, wry smile, intent on telling. Of middle years, teeth no longer whole... He holds out a tape cassette, at arm's length. "I will sing it for you, a cappella..."

"The stone which the builders rejected...," but in his own patois. "Even ma'asu ha-bonim..."

Analect 2.134x

12 July 2007. So, off we go--rolling clouds over mansard roof, blocky yellow school bus with back up lights showing, now the sound, too--that particular mindless regular beep, warning of nothing and everything all at once. A city bus chimes in--higher pitch, faster rhythm--but very much the same idea. Telegraphic messages to the cosmos--to other machines, perhaps, for only they would understand... Princess N visits yesterday, the lady in the crocodile--striking close to home, as we review the harvest. She teaches me a new word: zögern, from Rilke, I think--he used it in a poem... The dictionary is no help: to pause, to hesitate, to lag, to tarry--procrastinate, even--to demur. Falter, indecision--all the words that find that spot precisely in between intention and effect--where we're most human--a place of dream--how did she put it, yes, the wavery line...

Analect 2.133x

11 July 2007. Low gray clouds with trailing edges, touch of blue cutting through from below. All caution to the winds, mates, it's a merchant ship. "If you can only get them to meet you, once they're there, they're sold. Meet your neighbor..." Overheard conversations, avenue advice--how the town works, a little of this, a little of that. Yesterday: low clouds with trailing edges, two girls dancing, in a narrow hallway. From immobility to everything, in an instant, movement of the arms first, then the shoulders, feel of the beat--except that I watch in total silence--not a sound, just the flickering image of two figures in motion, Greek priestesses in daily dress, smiles, slippers and cut-off jeans...

Emma's birthday today: she's ten years old. Jane Austin, astronomy, flowers...

"I think it's gonna work...!"

Analect 2.132x

10 July 2007. Two ragged crows, veering over the playground, one leads, the other follows. Mist on the hills, a gray Pendleton blanket, raw wool of a neutral shade, alloyed... Lands of the Umayyads, from the Indus to the Pyrenees... early settlements in Hispania--Berber warriors, a Syrian king...they intermarried, soon enough--Roman remnants, gypsies, Visigoths...children with pale skin and blue eyes, their mothers from the north, recently converted...wholehearted, that is...the Ornament of the World, so said Hroswitha, a nun in Saxony--her description, from the tales of the ambassador of AlAndalus... Or so the story's told--a time of tolerance, a delight in all the facets of the world, where openness finds a home...the crescent and the wavy line...

"Se toma una esfera celeste, tan grande como se quiera..."

Analect 2.131x

9 July 2007. White smoke against white sky. Sharp bay wind picks up all remaining stubs on a tear-off flyer that's been taped to the streetlamp stanchion. Monochromatic morning, even the yellow hump of asphalt rolling up to the cleaners has a black-and-white demeanor--like the red wall-stripe just inside... Last night: ladder on shed roof, footsteps up above. Unwanted presences, unseen--later running across bank parking lot, hooded shirts, looking up and back. Furtive. Fertig. The great sea battles, relenlivened in slap-dash paint--a little imprecise for Napoleon, perhaps--Heart of Oak, Lobcouse and Spotted Dog. Patrick O'Brien, born in 1914, at the outset of the end of an era. Like Rachmaninoff, wandering in a lost past, all the way to the Second World War. "Monotonous in texture ... consisting mainly of artificial and gushing tunes ..." That's how the Grove Encyclopedia had it as late as 1954. And what about Sibelius. "Hopelessly provincial."

Yet Morton Feldman, in Darmstadt, humming the Sibelius Fifth...

Analect 2.130x

6 July 2007. Continuous gray sky, ripply gray-green pool, wiggle of fingers from Alison as a hello... Later, young Asian man in white cut-offs, striped top, sandals, load of clothes in his arms... Ladder in front of dark window, two men emerge, carefully carrying an unhooked neon sign--clean living...they lay it down on the sidewalk...

Bernice Abbott in New York, sometime in the late 1930s. Figure emerging from basement stairs, the Bowery, three large porkchops for 30 cents, Yankee pot roast, oxtail stew. Meal plates, a dozen or two more, enumerated in white hand-painted script, adjacent window and wall... An expected plethora...

Woman behind me, ordering t-shirts for children and grandchildren, every detail spelled out. "Aren't I a good customer...", and "I do all my homework..." Greg stands alongside... "One, two, three, four, five," pause, "six, seven..." A world of normalcy, taken for granted. Necessary, even. Mrs. Bridge, in her large car, lodged in the doorway of the garage, unable to get out... The midwest, late fall, snowstorm on the horizon...

Analect 2.129x

2 July 2007. Narrow gray-white wedge of cloud--long-horizontal--just over the 7-eleven. Red car angles back into lot, then sets forth. Beginnings.

The gathering for Leonard--praise and mystery. Elusive trailings of intellect... Winters' rationalism against doctor Julia's defiant, "I am a romantic." A poet of tears, said Jane Hirshfield. Leonard's "Falling," she places it in the middle of three. Carol's smile, quiet, many times emphasized, Jamie takes her arm, leads her to the podium. That Nathan grace--in him as well, a knowing flourish--wistful matador to the universe--but giving of life instead...