Analect 2.409x

30 December 2009. Foggy streets, up and down. Yellow disk of sun, veiled in gray...

Reading Shumway--his last word. Sarmiento, Rivadavia, Mariano Moreno--the heroes unravelled--brought low. An imagined communality--and yet another Yankee pronunciamiento. How things should be: José Artigas, Bartolomé Hidalgo. Thanks, Nick, but check it out--our Paris of the South, where a figure in heavy coat, standing at the narrow counter of Café Brasil, tips back a small sweet black espresso...

Bartolomé Mitre, winter light...

Analect 2.408x

19 December 2008. Rain water on porch, dark red in wavery amber light. Ying's face this morning, smile plus doubt. A river traveller's farewell...

Dance, foot turned back to steady the hip. La Argentinita. Encarnación López Julvez, de España, arms pulled high over her dark hair, a white flower tucked in behind, solid frame arched to the compás. Which is all.

White smoke over wet roof, drifts against gray sky...

Analect 2.407x

18 December 2008. Icy dawn, whoosh of Bart train on distant rail, earlier than early. Ice on all the east-west streets. A touch of Chicago comes to the East Bay.

Last night: the mathematicians. And Chizu Omori, a girl from Oceanside--from before the war. Now, her long gray-white hair, small frame, composed posture. All visible in just the way she occupies a chair. They were strawberry farmers, on leased land, "like a Japanese village."

Then: the Arizona camps, Rabbit in the Moon, dispersion. So she came to Berkeley--McCarthy period, loyalty oaths, Nixon. "Seems I spent my whole life voting against him..."

Chickens on Sixth Street, a feathery redemption.

Analect 2.406x

17 December 2008. Icy dawn, crinkly grass, glittery shards at edge of street. Pool bodies and shower mist, comraderie.

Last few days until they close--the Albany Pool--a monument, of sorts, gone...

The Szechenyi or the Rudas--baths of old, Buda and Pest, brought by the Turks, or the Romans before. The Gellért--green waters and marmol--four Hungarians of a certain age, submerged to the neck, gathered around a chessboard, or the Napi Gazdasag, financial news, held in two hands, eyeglasses perched on nose--calcium, magnesium, potassium--stocks dive and soar...

Analect 2.405x

16 December 2008. Rain on the streets, luminous, slanting. Indoors: the green pool, veiled in fog...

A mysterious Hungarian bath, even from Roman times--Sylvia Plachy's world, reeds and sows, all white, carved wood, stark turns against the snow. A figure, bundled in furs, totem of the dark, leaping now, with curved horn--winter's dance...

Golden flames...

Analect 2.404x

15 December 2008. Rain at dawn, Nicola with paws high on living room door, hoping for a quick exit. Natasha, the slinky blimp, in back, hoping for same. Then Ying, her wide face, sleepy eyes, a pool girl in the half-light. Watching over the living.

Photo of a man clinging to wall of rock. Normal colors--as if everyday, but we're two days out and 2000 feet up--on the face of Half Dome--kodachrome notwithstanding. A party of three, one tenuous line snaking down from above--the Roof. Another heaven...

Or mallards, in the estuary--Martinez perhaps, a bit of wetland amidst the powerlines and petroleum. Faithful in the dark waters, forever...

Analect 2.403x

11 December 2008. Sun. Lee's sharp laugh just outside. Then Lina in dark maroon sari, white five-gallon pail with thin layer of suds, pouring over curb. World needs a wash-up...

Nothing much to say, really. Driving home very late, curving street through a few redwoods, wash of headlights on Berkeley homes. Silent thoughts, here and there, one by one...

Lima beans with turmeric, peppered gold--a peasant king's repast...

Analect 2.402x

10 December 2008. Even and clear, two crows--make that three, turning and diving, white chalk dash of jet trail low on the southern horizon...

"I felt a sense that this is an awakening of the people." The subcomandante, rumpled shirt, lime green wristband and pulsy macro-chronometer, in a guest appearance in Sonora--a pueblo in Río Yaquí. Dusty brown pickup, men in work clothes and desert hats, the Indian woman alongside, all reds and maroons, a pink skirt, set against the light blue cloth at her neck--colors of awareness, her high cheeks in shadow--midday light--hands folded, eyes full of inquiry...

"Yo tenía el sentido..."

Analect 2.401x

9 December 2008. Cold night, bright dawn. Laura the pool guard, wrapped in headband, sweats and scarf...huddled on couch in between sets...

Voice of the governor, his thick a's and o's--that östereicher touch, radio days. "There will be cuts," gash on side of leg--as with Stefan, the swim team coach, hiking up his cuff as his workmate winces. Her round face, all this way and that--dismay as cure...

Antonio Gramsci--the hegemony of culture. Words from a harsher--and clearer--time. La lucha, the struggle... Letters from prison, the one to his mother...

"La vita è così, molto dura, e figli qualche volta devono dare dei grandi dolori alle loro mamme, se vogliono conservare il loro dignità di uomini..."

Analect 2.400x

8 December 2008. Jumbled gray shelf of cloud. Colder, then warmer, then colder again...

Question of pirates--Somalia, this time, not the Caribbean. A Johnny Depp with a purpose--forget Vanessa Paradis in her two-tone pumps--here hunched barefoot, speeding across a choppy sea, perched on the prow of a heavy white fiberglass launch. No Hollywood bandana, but an assault rifle, grenades--something to write home about, seen vaguely from the brige of the ship, five miles off, a blip on the radar--trawler, most likely-- tuna, jackfish, silvertip shark...

Analect2.399x

5 December 2009. Sun in December, no complaints. Wind from the hills, palm fronds.

Bonnard. His impressive smudges, nudged along a vector of patience and true belief. Belief, yes, but in what? Quiet, perhaps, and the play of warm and cool--a moment's sunlight on a southern balustrade, spot of warm white and yellow gold illuminating the rose-violet shadows. Who can say--words are nice, but the essential pathways of the optic nerve will out. Was he joshing--the techno-speak, as with Thomas Eakins, the opthamologist--seen by chance, scored prism in his hands...

Learners take note, the horizon beyond...

Analect 2.398x

4 December 2008. Sun through scarves of mist, tracing the hills.

Yesterday--the ancestors. Faces of all ages--kindly and benevolent, peering down from the brightly lit walls, forging a connection through sense of touch. A dignified man with browned face, strong but rounded shoulders, hands tucked in pockets, standing in front of the landscape of Michoacan. A pueblo--Jaime has to check un papelito to recall the name, a place where "the houses still looked impoverished and broken. Despite this, the weather is beautiful and the people are as well..."

Later, gentle room with warm white walls--sitting side by side, la musica, beginning we know not where...

As well...

Analect2.397x.jpg

3 December 2008. Fog again, bridges veiled... Freighters hidden in the mist, their mournful horns...

Odetta, no more. Her wall of sound--entirely from within, stately and at home... a manger after the harvest, pouring forth...

We bow again, the distance--lost...

Friends.

Analect 2.396x

2 December 2008. Nice gloomy clouds with patches of blue... lifting through into tender sky...

An ancient encounter in the cafeteria line, amidst a sea of youth--all milling about, with paper pails of rice and meat, piles of toasted bread... Both in the footwear of the literati class--flip-flops, that is. One-time wanderers on a lonely road. The lost distance--a recognition and a bow...

Analect 2.395x

1 December 2008. Gray fog holding the dawn, yellow street lamps, muted, gone.

Delta roads--rutted and worn--a farm track into valley air. Flooded fields--alfalfa, rice, corn--now standing empty. The Mokolumne, winding low, mournful calls from above--our sandhill cranes, banking in a wide V, calling out to those below. Hidden in ochre against brown fields--pairs, in furrows, gathered.

A dance, wings held high, all awkward leg, but still...their grace...