Downpour.

Today, so much heat, smoldering and steaming and sweating the life out of the morning and early afternoon. By noon I was in a second change of clothes. And then the gather, the grumble, the release of a storm. We settled down to a hazy, humid evening; at dusk, the western vista was dark trees on a distant hill, silhouetted in shimmer, the air's own whitened setting. The humidity combined with a strange concatenation of emotion and attention and energy swirling today; it's all left me drawn out beyond myself, threaded too thinly, feeling too much, knowing too little, unable to say enough if even I could figure out what to say at all.

At tonight's poetry reading, I inadvertently managed to ink up my own hand and arms, somehow just right for the text I have always been becoming.

Blooming clematis!

Indeed, such a goodness that tonight's writing gets an exclamation point. On either side of my garage door are little trellises with generally sickly looking vines crawling on them. In the spring, my landlord cut the vines all the way to the ground. They promptly started growing back, once they'd been shorn of all their dead encumbrance. And last night, getting in the car to leave for dinner at my favorite mid-Ohio restaurant, I realized that the western clematis, the one that gets the most light, has bloomed.

The following story has nothing to do with my quiet adoration of these moon-soft flowers, but I'll tell it anyhow: When I was looking at graduate schools, I stayed with a woman who told me about how her mother, a fervent gardener, got so flustered while explaining sex to her that she said, "And then there's your clematis..." leaving my host to say, "I have a flower?" (Just when you thought that rhetoric was so outworn as to be of no use!)

When I moved to Ithaca, I was certain I would be a terrific gardener. I bought pots of yellow yarrow while I was still in Indiana; I spent a few of my first days in town breaking earth and laying down a brick border and weeding and prepping the most beautiful, rich soil I'd ever seen. I planted the yarrow. I planted some bulbs later in the fall. The next summer, I bought coneflowers, zinnias, impatiens, black-eyed susans, gerbera daisies, and some more yarrow. And bee balm. I laid them all out in the bed so that the right plants would be in the shade at the right time, so that the sun-loving things could climb and grow and thrive. I cut beautiful bouquets all summer long. I watered and kept up with the weeding.

But when the summer ended, I abandoned the garden. Because some of the things I'd planted were perennials, I still had plants and flowers the next summer. But the weeds were formidable--the soil was, as I've said, the richest I've ever seen, and my backyard was full of this very strange weed that reminded me of a carrot gone horribly wrong: its roots were hot orange and everywhere. It was impossible to eradicate. And then the strange weedy trees started growing, and it was all over, another of my sad stories of neglected growth.

I bring that old garden up because one of my dreams, when I first moved to Ithaca, had been to plant heliotropic flowers--particularly morning glories--so that I could watch them open and turn toward the sun every day, before folding in upon themselves at dusk. It has recently been pointed out to me that I attribute human emotions, particularly tender ones, to all manner of non-human things. I don't take umbrage with this observation; I believe that I do invest all manner of things with lives and ongoing stories. Perhaps this makes me a personifier. And somehow, the idea of watching the deep purples and blues of morning glories unfold and refold daily made me feel as though my new life in Ithaca would be one of strong tenderness and tenacious delicacy. I never really considered moonflowers. I'm not sure that I'd ever heard of moonflowers.

It is true that I am in love with so many things (including, now, the entry for "misprint" in my ABC for Book Collectors, in which every instance of "misprint" is misspelled: misprimp, mosprint, misprant, &c.). The lightly soft lavender of these flowers' petals has officially joined the list. Fresh blueberries, now available cheap, have been on for nearly a decade. Grilled sirloin sandwiches on seeded semolina bread on the porch at 3 p.m.? New to the list. Grilled mushrooms? On the list since before I can remember. Evening cool after a day when Weather Underground told me the temperature topped 100? Yes, please.

Now it's time to stroll out into that cool, enjoying the freedom to move without perspiring.

Oh, I know it's too soon.

We just had a personals day, after all. But these just arrived, and they are too good not to share.

I make no form of formlessness.

I have told you briefly, before, about how glad I am to have been at Cornell at the same time as Archie Ammons, even if I didn't know him. The semester after his death, I was assigned to his office with several other graduate instructors who were only teaching during the fall semester. I spent a lot of that semester thinking about Archie's absence.

This morning, I came across his poem "Corsons Inlet" in the Poetry Daily Archive (a great resource, by the way). I know that I have read this poem in the past, but it had a lovely, thrilling effect on me all over again this morning, making me realize that I must never really have known the poem before.

In the poem, the speaker recalls his morning walk. Here are two of my favorite bits, along with a link to the whole poem. (My copy of Ammons's Collected Poems 1951-1971 is stuck full of black and white snapshots I took on my way home from campus one snowy, icy evening while I was writing my dissertation. I know that one reason I love Ammons is that he and his verses so loved a place that I have loved so much too.)

from Corsons Inlet

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
        straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
                  of sight:

                        I allow myself eddies of meaning:
yield to a direction of significance
running
like a stream through the geography of my work:
      you can find
in my sayings
                       swerves of action
                       like the inlet's cutting edge:
                  there are dunes of motion,
organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance
in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:

but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events
I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting
beyond the account:

(and then, the end of the poem)

                I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
                still around the looser, wider forces work:
                I will try
          to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
                that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

-- A. R. Ammons

You should go read the rest of the poem. I have given you only the briefest of tastes.

The diagrams of formes and impositions I studied today make my head spin; two nights ago, I dreamed that I was sitting a massive math exam--on beyond calculus, even--because that's what so much of this bibliography material feels like to me. It's not an unwelcome feeling. Sometimes I miss using that part of my brain on a regular basis, I for whom numbers and formulae also used to sing.

As if on cue, the buzzer on my dryer alerts me that I should be folding clothes now.

source for tonight's image: New Jersey's Department of State's Archive.

The cool of stars.

We are on our way into the hottest days of the summer this week, the weatherpeople tell us; tonight, my house is a good number of degrees hotter inside than the outside air, and so I'm trying to air everything out before heading to sleep. One lovely thing about days as hot as we've had lately can be (but isn't always) the relief of the evening's cool. Walking home from having done some reading at the bookstore, I realized with pleasure that my bare arms were almost cold, swinging through the night air. And when I arrived at home and got away from the street's canopy of lights and leaves, I realized how profoundly visible the stars are tonight. And so, bien sur, I got out my tripod, lengthened the shutter speed on the camera, and took you a picture. (I took it particularly for you city-bound folks.)

It's not a fantastic night shot, I know. You might have to turn off the lights where you are, if you want to see the stars against all that black. But they're there. Click on the image to see it larger, and you'll maybe see more than just the one near the bottom of the image. And now fill in all those dark spaces with a plethora of smaller, lighter stars, and you'll have some sense of the sky under which I sit tonight, reading about imposition and gearing up for a hot, hot day tomorrow. For now, there's no haze, no heat, no hurry. Just night, and cool, and stars, and a fervent hope for universal clarity and moves toward benevolence.

A personal matter.

If you were here, and if you cared to hear, I could tell you about what I learned today about hand-press (as opposed to machine-press) books, about chain lines and wire lines on laid paper, about how difficult it can be to determine the format of a book printed on wove paper with no watermark, and about the different ways of producing a duodecimo (or twelvemo) gathering. It has, in other words, been a day of intellectual ferment, one of those days when I actually had to create a tiny octavo gathering in order to understand what an instructional video was trying to tell me about how that format's pagination works. Now I'm on to reading about type--how it's cast, how it's put together, how it's described.

Now, the waning moon is rising yellowly over the fields, into the clear sky that has somehow followed a sweltering, blue-hot day. And because I'm not writing much to you this evening, I'll give you two images, one for decoration and one for amusement. Tomorrow, more.

A farewell and a reunion.

Tonight we had our second tornado warning of the week, which made for some exciting post-dinner, pre-dessert ping pong action in my excellent friends' basement. Unlike Monday's storm, this one actually passed right through Gambier, and though it seems not to have spawned tornadoes, it did pour forth some serious flooding in this area. Now, the stars are back out; my walk home from dinner took me through a world of earnest waterdropping from trees, ceilinged by pale summer stars.

During the afternoon, on my way to the library, I stopped yet again to visit the tree. Sometime between 9:30 p.m. yesterday and 2 p.m. today, the tree crew returned to take away or grind up the rest of the tree's remains. There's not much left. What you can see in this image is the capital from one of the columns on the original version of the building in the background; the building burned in the nineteenth century and was duly rebuilt. The capital has sat under our now-gone tree throughout my relationship with Kenyon. One of my favorite pictures of myself with my brother has us sitting back to back on that capital just after my baccalaureate, those many years ago.

When I talked to her about the tree this morning, my excellent friend suggested a third poem that I will now add to yesterday's group. This one is William Cowper's "Yardley Oak" (1791). The poem is too long to give you in full, but I'll offer a few segments. Alas, there seems to be no e-text of this one to which I can send you; you'll have to hunt down Cowper's poetry in volumes if you want more.

Yardley Oak

Survivor sole, and hardly such, of all
That once lived here thy brethren, at my birth
(Since which I number threescore winters past)
A shatter'd vet'ran, hollow-trunk'd perhaps
As now, and with excoriate forks deform,
Relicts of Ages! Could a mind imbued
With truth from heav'n created thing adore,
I might with rev'rence kneel and worship Thee.
It seems Idolatry with some excuse
When our forefather Druids in their oaks
Imagin'd sanctity. (ll. 1-11)
.................................................................
                    Oh could'st thou speak
As in Dodona once thy kindred trees
Oracular, I would not curious ask
The Future, best unknown, but at thy mouth
Inquisitive, the less ambiguous Past.
By thee I might correct, erroneous oft,
The Clock of History, facts and events
Timing more punctual, unrecorded facts
Recov'ring, and mis-stated setting right.
Desp'rate attempt till Trees shall speak again! (ll. 40-49)
................................................................
Change is the diet on which all subsist
Created changeable, and Change at last
Destroys them. Skies uncertain, now the heat
Transmitting cloudless, and the solar beam
Now quenching in a boundless sea of clouds,
Calm and alternate storm, moisture and drought,
Invigorate by turns the springs of life
In all that live, plant, animal, and man,
And in conclusion mar them. Nature's threads,
Fine, passing thought, ev'n in her coarsest works,
Delight in agitation, yet sustain
The force that agitates not unimpaired,
But worn by frequent impulse, to the cause
Of their best tone their dissolution owe. (ll. 72-85)
...................................................................
So stands a Kingdom whose foundations yet
Fail not, in virtue and in wisdom lay'd,
Though all the superstructure by the tooth
Pulverized of venality, a shell
Stands now, and semblance only of itself.
Thine arms have left thee. Winds have rent them off
Long since, and rovers of the forest wild
With bow and shaft, have burnt them. Some have left
A splinter'd stump bleach'd to a snowy white,
And some memorial none where once they grew.
Yet Life still lingers in thee, and puts forth
Proof not contemptible of what she can
Even where Death predominates. The Spring
Thee finds not less alive to her sweet force
Than yonder upstarts of the neighbour wood
So much thy juniors, who their birth received
Half a millenium since the date of thine.
          But since, although well-qualified by age
To teach, no spirit dwells in thee, seated here
On thy distorted root, with hearers none
Or prompter save the scene, I will perform
Myself, the oracle, and will discourse
In my own ear such matter as I may. (ll. 120-142)
-- William Cowper

There's more, of course; you can see from the line numbers I've offered that there's much more, and the poem continues beyond this ending. But these are the bits of it that I like best, at least on first read, and that I think you might like picking through. This one is different from what I usually offer, of course; for one thing, it might be the oldest piece of poetry I've put before you. Find the lines whose sounds and ideas you like best.

At least there weren't small children frolicking in the sawdust and woodchips today.

And just yesterday evening, as I headed south to see the tree's stump, I rediscovered an old friend whose eulogy I had also been meditating. Whoever brings him back after he's been away for awhile must, I think, have some kind of link to my brain, in order to know just when I'm getting most fearful that he's gone for good.

Once again, tonight, I feel so exhausted that I could just drop, and so I think I will. A piece of breakfast pie (lemon meringue, a gift from a student who went home today, the summer session over) awaits me in the refrigerator. Such a thing is always good to know before bed.

Requiem for a tree; or, trees I have loved, redux.

Back in March, as you may recall, I told you about my history with sycamore trees, including the enormous sycamore across the street from downtown Gambier. That night, I didn't tell you about Gambier's other extraordinary trees: the Upside-Down Tree (which is, I believe, some kind of beech), the Marriage Tree (which, alas, was split in two during a storm several summers ago; its south half remains, listing and incomplete, loss incarnate), and the giant oak tree (which, as far as I know, never had a name). This afternoon, rounding the corner of the library after a field trip over the county line to eat pie (and to get a quick gander at the outside of a "Toppless Bar"), I realized something was terribly wrong. A crew of men in hardhats gathered in an area demarcated with yellow tape and nylon rope. Limbs already littered the ground. A crane stood by, temporarily disused. And towering above it all, what was left of one of our oldest trees--a tree whose age I've heard as both 250 and 350 years old.

The tree has been leaning eastward and looking vaguely threatened and threatening for no small time. But I was stunned to see a landmark like this one coming down without any announcement to my community. I have sat in breeze and shade under this tree on quiet afternoons and evenings, practicing thinking quietly and doing nothing; I have been photographed under this tree with family members; I have stopped and listened for birds in its highest branches; I have greeted it in passing to and from classes across campus from my office. This tree has been part of my life for more than a decade. Had I known it was coming down this afternoon, I would have sat under it one more time, or embraced it, or given it a kiss goodbye--anything to recognize the strong beauty it has been in my landscape during both of my Gambier lifetimes.

As it was, I made it to the tree's deathbed in time to get some pictures of its last moments, and to hear the cruelly diminutive sound it made when the man with the chainsaw finally completed his cut. I had been about to open my computer and start alerting people to the tree's impending downfall when I realized that it would be impending for only a few more seconds. And then the tree was on the ground, while those angels callously continued their cold frolics, as though nothing had happened.

By this point, I was sitting on the ground, watching and shooting and wanting to shout. Others from the community had gathered around, but there was no collective response, no ceremony. Instead, we all sat and stood silently. I suspect everyone was more than a little bit shocked. This tree was older--by far--than the college.

In recognition of the tree's demise, my young poet friend sent along the poem that came to his mind:

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

-- Philip Larkin

And I remembered the first poem I ever had to memorize:

Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

-- Joyce Kilmer

Even these poems together didn't seem a fitting tribute to the tree, though--especially since I'm not especially taken with the Kilmer poem, if ever I were, though I do like stanzas 1, 2, and 5 quite a lot--and so at about 8:30 p.m., I headed toward south campus, camera in hand, hoping to say a better goodbye. As I approached, however, I found that a summer group that has taken over much of the campus had spilled onto the tree; several ten-year-old boys were standing on and around the stump of what had been majesty, and they were striking it with the longest pieces of itself they had been able to find. I contemplated what would be best to do and decided just to wade into the tree's pieces and ignore the small boys. They stayed out of the way of my picture-taking; when one of them wondered aloud how many rings the tree had, I told him it was probably around 300. Mostly, I wanted to accost the adults who were vaguely watching these children and to tell them to teach the children some respect for this kind of loss. And yet I didn't.

I did do three things, however. I got pictures of the stump, and I believe (though I am no tree scientist) that these pictures suggest that the tree really was ailing, which somehow makes me feel a bit better about its having been felled.

And I picked up a few pieces of the tree for my own safe-keeping.

And I said goodbye.

Fatigue's low blowing.

When you're fatigued, where do you feel it? For me, the deep stuff settles just on the back side of my retinas, circling my eyesockets and heavying my head. Here on the porch again, in a quietly vigorous post-rain breeze, my once-and-future San Franciscan friend e-mailing beside me, I feel as though I could put my head to one side (or, rather, leave it to the side where I've already put it) and doze, sinking into some pillow of tiredness that's cushioning me round this afternoon.

Five deer materialize in the yard across the street--three does and two fawns, all ears aflicker and tiny spots winkling and new legs ricketing across the road. One fawn makes a kind of mewing, seeking the group, then skitters across to the woods where all are. And then they are all gone, that loveliness, those lives. I will see them again--they come back over and over--but I learn them anew each time, just in case. In case of what, I'm not fully sure--perhaps utter disappearance, failed recognition, irrevocable loss.

Driving to Columbus along my favorite route yesterday, I was able to check on all the fields and the barns and the animals. The corn has sprung tassels suddenly, gilding the green fields, reminding me of how much of the summer has gone, of how we're beyond the midpoint now. The barns sit their vigils of ruin, even amidst the extravagance of growth. The fallow fields lie scruffed with weeds and brush, with various stumps and mounds anchoring explosions of plant lives that will yield nothing but their own profusion. And the animals: cows moving en masse, devouring: this sight is not so unexpected, though it still touches me every time. But yesterday, a horse farm, with colts--and one colt standing just behind a mare, its head pressed against her flank, just resting. That quiet companionability, that undemanding needfulness, seemed a small revelation.

We have continued having rain today, though not as much or as hard as the other night. Thus, though these pictures are yesterday afternoon's, they tell a story one could see along our roads today as well: the thick grey of summer stormclouds, the green-black silhouettes of lengthening cornstalks, the peeking of barns in sodden fields.

The breeze in the porch is perfect for a drowse; it is raincatch and wavelap, grassrush and skyturn. I have quiet hopes of brief sleep.

In my dream two nights ago, my beloved Brooklynite wrote to reveal a second pregnancy, announcing it using the descriptive bibliography notations I am learning: "If you want to know, P4 will have arrived sometime in May." In my dream three nights ago, I sat down in a diner with a friend and also with a serial killer whose next target I might have been, in the hopes that I could apprehend him (while sitting in a diner?) and stop his charismatic careening through my world. Even if you knew my mind well enough to tell me why I'm having these dreams, I suspect I wouldn't really want to hear you.

Tired supplications.

Tonight, simply a poem.

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

-- Galway Kinnell

Riding shotgun.

What a day today: hot and breezy in the morning, the sky a sunny hot blue, even the angel turned supplicant. In the evening, rain falling for hours, puddling the yard and sprinkling us on the porch, while we sat here with our computers, building our various knowledges and splitting our box of Russell Stover assorted dark chocolates. (My friend and I turn out to be perfectly matched in chocolate consumption, as in so many things; she prefers the creams and nougats, while I would eat all the caramels right this second if I didn't know better.)

This afternoon, we set out on a luckless trip to find lunch--luckless (the restaurants closed) but for the fact that the day was still lovely and we were cascading over the county's hills and I was taking pictures out the window while she drove. (This is how we ended up with the box of chocolates.)

Then, unexpectedly, sometime around 4 p.m. the disaster siren started up in Gambier, because we were under a tornado warning. We proceeded to watch the progress of the storm on a variety of television channels (we happened to be at my excellent friends' house, cooking some leftovers for lunch). Eventually we ascertained, with the best of our midwestern intuitive abilities, that neither we nor the houses we're occupying were going to blow away, and so we ventured back to my front porch. And here we have been for hours and hours. I continue to learn bibliographic and book-collecting terms from ABC for Book Collectors. I didn't tell you yesterday's favorite:

bisquing: obliterating passages in a printed book by painting them out with black ink or paint or over-printing with a blank block, usually undertaken in the interests of censorship or cancellation for some other reason.

Today, I have fallen hard for the fact that I now know why we refer to capital letters (or majuscules) as "upper case" and small letters (or miniscules) as "lower case":

case: a large shallow tray divided into compartments to contain type. The frequency of use and therefore quantity determined the size of the compartments, which were similarly arranged to be convenient to the compositor's hand. The upper case contained the majuscules, the lower case miniscules.

But then there's this one, which strikes me as so strangely resonant and melancholy, in ways I can't even talk about:

conjugate leaves: the leaves which "belong to one another," i.e. if traced into and out of the back of the book, are found to form a single piece of paper, are said to be "conjugate."... [N]on-conjugate leaves are sometimes called singletons.

The rain kept pushing over us, for hours and hours, until finally it pushed past, right about the time our dinner arrived. People have shuffled past nearly silent all night long; branches have toppled from nearby trees; we're pretty certain we heard a heavy animal rolling around earlier; we are absolutely certain that we listened to part of cats' mating earlier. But then, over and above all this wet rustle and sodden squelching, the moon made its full appearance after all, if a bit misted and fogged. I have high hopes that tomorrow's moon will come up huge and red, a fat mid-July rising.

Multiplying the moon.

My Knoxvillian friend and I spent the better part of the day on the porch, she doing some writing and I learning bibliographic terms. When the sun had gone and the dusk was growing, we ventured out to procure books and crackers. We didn't get very far before we found the moon, a day off its fullness, rising orangely behind a campus building down the street. I debated with myself over whether or not to go back for the camera. "Go," she said. "I'll stand here and guard the moon."

Returned, with my camera, I proceeded to try and catch that orange moon. I do not have a particularly steady hand; I didn't take the time to grab the tripod; the pictures, as a result, have a multiplicity of moons, light swerving and jittering at the centers of my frames.

It was--it is--a night of great coolness and calm, a night of still air and quiet deer and lovely chance meetings in the bookstore and on gravel paths. It is a night of relishing found cheese and strong coffee and hot milk on the porch, in the low light from the study window. It is a night of settling fatigue, a need to sink swiftly into sleep, in a house filled with the heavy-wafted scent of espresso, while my friend hews her academic work downstairs. It is a night of some small mystery; it would seem that I have a new local reader, though I do not know who (hello, whoever you are!).

It is, in short, a night of some serendipity and serene strangeness. Paying for the fruits of our foraging at the bookstore, at nearly 10:45 p.m., we ran into my beloved classics friend, the man who taught me everything I know about Greek, who was making photocopies for a family reunion. Among the pieces he'd copied was an essay his aunt had written in the early 1920s, a kind of sermon called "What Hath God Wrought?". And lo and behold if the end of that piece didn't fit right in with the images I'd been taking (or trying to take) up and down campus for the previous half-hour, not to mention with the life I've been living up and down campus this year: "Let your imagination exercise itself upon the charm of night lit by a clear moon; the awe inspired by rolling thunder-clouds; the grandeur of mountain peaks; or the constant interest of breaking waves. Then, as you have opportunity, revel in the real presence of these wonders, and you will find your inmost soul exclaiming under the pressure of a thrill that never diminishes."

As usual, my inmost soul is exclaiming tonight, even in this quiet. Perhaps especially in this quiet.

Sigh, and sigh again.

Today: food, drink, drink, food, drink, drink, food. Drink. Food. That's both it and so far beneath it. There's nothing else to say now, because it's time to sleep.

A Sunday morning postscript: last night's menu: lamb and chicken wrapped in grape leaves, skewered and grilled; zucchini, skewered and grilled; potatoes and onions, skewered and grilled; asparagus, grilled (but not skewered). A marvelous salad. Delicious wine. Delicious company. A dessert on fire (designedly so). And this morning: parents sleeping on the couch, tiny birds riffling through the lawn, roosters crowing somewhere nearby, a hazy sunrise beyond the eastern trees, and my porch inimitably embracing it all.

(Meanwhile, yesterday afternoon, my father, approaching Gambier from the north, found some cows and stopped to take their pictures. In case you don't know, I'll tell you: some cows are not only remarkably photogenic but even remarkably photophilic.

This one was both.)

Wonder Woman bowls again.

Tonight--and how, she asks, has this blog become so occasional all of a sudden? perhaps it has to do with the fact that the more poetic musings have now spun off into, of all things (it is still so shocking), poetry--bowling with the summer students and the teaching staff. We four sequestered ourselves in a lane, which was not a particularly pedagogically sound move but which led, by the time we played the post-student game three, to high. jinks. As in: let's name ourselves after superheroes! No one can call Wonder Woman faster than I, not even Spidey, Thor, and (ahem) Tinkerbell. And I pulled down a 163 in that game; that's my best score ever. (The others were both 122. I have to give it up for my mother's bowling ball, The Pearl. That thing gets the job done.)

In some ways, this week (particularly its post-grading end) feels like my summer vacation, arrived at last: cartwheels on a dusk expanse of lawn, drives around town and country with windows down and music loud (though this afternoon I got lost on some Knox County backroads and started to wonder whether I'd ever make it home), bowling, baking (the first 2/3 of a Baked Alaska project is currently stashed in my freezer, preparing for its meringuing and baking and flaming tomorrow), feeding others, watching movies. I'm even, perhaps in a good way, taking a little break from voracious reading. That break will have to stop almost immediately, but I'm starting to think that I should follow my instincts on this one and let myself be reading-stopped for a little while.

One thing (or, in this case, person) I have resumed is thinking about Joseph Cornell, who is, in some ways, the inspiration for the way I conceived of this project from the beginning. For a new poem cycle I'm meditating upon, I'm paging through my Cornell volumes, searching out birds and birdlike things, thinking about what it means to box objects up and re-present them in variously immobilized forms, and about what it means to experience something beautiful only in that boxed-up format. I've been schlepping my Cornell books all over the house for the past couple of days; with me, such schlepping is always a precursor to some interesting thing rumbling along, so I'm eager to see what's going to come springing out next. You may recall my having said that my beloved Brooklynite seemed to me to be under her body's total control when she was first pregnant with her dear small one (who is less small now that he is two); in a way, I feel as though I'm under the control of whatever part of me it is that's generating these poems. And I have to say: I like it.

I liked bowling that 163, too.

Fireflies on the ground are a glory: they synchronize with the sounds of distant fireworks; they blur into horizontal lines across the countryside when one espies them from the backseat of one's friends' car on the ride home from dinner. But what I'm loving tonight are the fireflies blinking from the tops of the biggest trees in town, up in their darklingest branches, black against the moon-blue sky.

Yet another personal ad for your delectation.

While we were dining at my favorite Ohioan restaurant tonight, my excellent poet colleague said to me, "I can't believe you haven't posted my personal ad yet." "You have an ad in the London Review of Books?" I asked. "No, no," she said, "the ad I carry!" And then I remembered: a month ago, she and I had lunch, and partway through our meal, she pulled out a laminated yellow sheet with a personal ad on it. I took its picture. Here it is.

(You know you need not worry; tomorrow I will tell you more things. That's how this project works.)

Cartwheels and dew.

Tonight, watching one of my TAs try to do cartwheels after dinner, I decided it was time to give it another try myself. Years and years ago, I wanted to be able to do cartwheels, wanted to be able to wheel over the grass with that much controlled energy and extension. I watched her a handful of times--and what was startling was the upsurge of happy anxiety I felt in those moments of watching, interplaying with the yearning for motion that I felt in my core, the way I could feel my muscles twitching in emulation of her joyful clumsiness; and what was also startling was how worried I suddenly was that I'd find my bones too brittle and my muscles too slack to do the work of propelling me through the air or, more likely, of landing me safely aground--and then I decided it was my turn. And I didn't do a pretty job, and yes, after a few tries I started falling out of verticality right onto my left thigh (which I'm fully expecting to see black and blue tomorrow). But the first couple were, miraculously, almost something like the cartwheels I was never able to do as a child. In not much time at all, all four of us were up and taking turns trying to pinwheel our bodies through the deepening dusk. By the time we all collapsed back to the lawn, bats were skittering over the sky over our heads. Stars and planets were beginning to appear all around. And when I lay back on the grass--to be at eye-level with the grass! when was I last there?--I could see that the evening dew had materialized, drop by drop, a drop for every blade within sight.

Intricacy, then, is the subject.

I am reading Annie Dillard again this morning, here on the couch in the breeze. I am missing my community's Independence Day celebration for the third year running. I am in need of some solitude, some focus. I can see myself reflected in the enormity of yesterday's purchase, though, and I meditate the movies I could watch, in lieu of doing the steadier things that need to be done. The dryer buzzes, letting me know that the clothes I've left in there for days are, once again, ready to be taken out and folded. This time, perhaps I'll take care of them.

I tend to get tired of domestic tasks even before I undertake them. This realization has been one of the shocks of my adult life, particularly given my lineage: my grandmother once broke an oven window, working to get it cleaner; she took the paint off of woodwork, scrubbing it down. In my mother's house, we cleaned regularly, as a team. There were never dirty dishes; there was never actual dirt. Somehow these tasks do not climb onto my list of priorities; somehow the next book or writing or poem comes in first, a choice never even making it to the level of consciousness. Give me twenty minutes and I'll read a few paragraphs; give me twenty dollars and I'll buy a book or two. (Though, apparently, if you give me eight hours and many twenties, I'll buy a television. I think I'll stop mocking myself about the television any second now; I've been rocking the same 13" set for nine years, and I think this one's time had come, to the extent that one can say such a thing and live.)

And so today, I am putting off my dishes and dried clothes, even my dressing, to read Annie Dillard's thinking about the morality of studying the world through a microscope, about the intricacy of the created world. "The creator," she notes, "churns out the intricate texture of least works that is the world with a spendthrift genius and an extravagance of care. This is the point" (127).

Last night, in my dreams, it snowed in July. We walked through the streets of Gambier marvelling at the world turned upside down. We might have been barefoot. I'm not even sure who we were. In my dream, I was moving house, going to a new apartment whose living room had blue walls, though also some white walls, and these walls had gashes and holes in them. I filled them in with spackle; I meditated paint colors that would cover up my patch jobs; the spackle dried to the color of the walls; I kept contemplating color, planning to do the whole room the blue it obviously wanted to be. At 6:57 a.m., a booming awoke me: I thought Gambier was exploding: the sound racketed and ricocheted for a good minute, my mind racketing and ricocheting narratives of destruction and of slow-settling death even after I realized it was just a loud, lingering thunderclap, part of a swift-sailing storm. I contemplated getting up to make my coffee, even though I'd sat up late last night. Then, I woke up at 10 a.m.

Today will be a day for particularities. I can feel it. "The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity, for which I would die, and I shall," Dillard writes. "The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that, as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about the creation" (129).

Late last night, on a backroad just outside Gambier, a fawn in the road, unable to make sense of its direction, unable to figure out how to cross from one green space to the other across that wet river of asphalt. I tapped my car's horn--wondering what the encounter would have been, had I been on foot--hoping to startle it enough to get it to go the rest of the way to one ditch or another. Instead, it lost its footing on the slick black road and nearly fell, and I lamented my misjudgment. Eventually it tottered and trembled, in all its frighted wide-eyed, large-eared infancy, back into the extra-verdant underbrush (we are so damp and fecund here this week; the rain falls, the weeds shoot, the corn has reached shoulders), to watch as I eased by. It was the third fawn I've seen in two days. (When Sufjan Stevens does his Ohio album, I hope he'll sing our deer.) I don't yet have this year's fawns on film, but here are the two I caught last year on July 1; I think you'll see why I've been awaiting their arrival (though I don't know whether I told you that I have been).

"I am not making chatter," she says of a "poor wretch" who flies from her at a party. "I mean to change his life. I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine" (Dillard 132-3).

Visions of something like grandeur.

This afternoon, a venture to Columbus to acquire a truly massive television, one more massive than I had any sense until it was in the living room. It's only 26", but it's wide, and that makes a difference. This television is made for movies (which is all it will ever have to play with): it has that 16:9 thing going on, and I am about to enjoy my first experience with living room widescreen goodness.

To make some kind of amends that I feel I need to make for having gone over to the dark side of larger television ownership--I who had a "kill your television" icon sticker and who refuse to have cable in the house--I'm offering you a pair of images from the très pastoral drive down to the home electronics store (for which I won't shill, damnit). Note: mid-Ohio raininess, a barn falling down, cows standing. The litany of my life. Note also (those of you who worry): I did not take these pictures; my traveling companion and television-lifter managed the camera on the outbound trip, before we forgot to put it within reach for the return. Today was one of those days where it was lighter at 8 p.m. than at 1:30 p.m.

And we all fall down slackjawed to marvel at words.

Sometimes my photographs are just a day behind. Last night, I went out for one of my two-mile evening walks (from one end of campus to the other and back again), and among the things I saw were the little spires on Old Kenyon, the dorm crowning the south end of campus, with a waxing moon behind them. I didn't confine myself to carrying only myself, as I sometimes do on such walks; instead I took my new Defunct shoulder bag, full of the books I'm wanting to read (or finish) now that my brain has a little more space to itself again. (Mentioning the bag makes me remember how much I've been wanting to tell you about my favorite internet retailers this spring, in case you're in the mood for something super chic. Check out Fancy Jewels (whence came the almost-matched pair of rings of which I wear one half), Superhero Designs (whence comes excitingly cool beaded jewelry, from an exceptionally friendly jewelry-maker), and Rebecca Haas (who produces simple, lovely silver and gold pieces; one of her Loop necklaces was a thirtieth birthday present to myself and has barely been off my neck since April). I'll shill for these women since they've helped keep me feeling cool this year, and maybe you want to feel cool, too. Not that we don't all have our own ways of feeling cool. Mine happen to include wearing jewelry made by friendly creative people, apparently.) But on the walk I ended up focusing mostly on what was around me anyway, despite all those books. I tried getting you a picture of the sea of fireflies into which I sank on the large lawn at the end of campus. I was not so successful, so I'll leave you to imagine it: blue dusk, a long spread of green (those of you who live near Prospect Park will have no difficulty imagining), the insistent, syncopated blinking of insect lights.

Today has been another day for regrouping, resettling, recentering, chiefly in the interests of moving back to the scholarly business of the summer, now that I've done the pedagogical business. Putting things that way makes them sound separable, which they certainly are not; the summer class I've just finished had as much scholarly value to me as nearly anything I've done in the past three years. But my brain--and I don't know if every academic's brain is like this--can only do so many different intense tasks in any given day, and what ends up happening to me is that I work extraordinarily well in either scholarly mode or teacherly mode on any given day. What this means is that I've been off of scholarly mode for several weeks. Quite happily so, I'll reiterate. But now I'm just as happy to feel myself turning back.

Of course, things have gotten a little bit more complicated on my scholarly production front over the past six months or so, as my other writing has stepped up--first these pieces, then the longer-scale works I started imagining these pieces could become, then the shorter-scale fictional pieces that started ekeing out early this month, and now, suddenly and strangely, the poetry that is whipping and ripping from me, congealing in my walking moments and my downtimes, clambering for the page the moment I have a minute to spare. It is so extraordinary a thing, this poetry-writing, that I'm devoting what time I have left before the power cuts out (we are in a thunderstorm), or before I decide I'm done for the night, to writing about it.

For the first few days I was writing it again, I was keeping count, as you know if you're keeping score at home. A poem! A second poem? A third? A fourth... A fifth, oh a fifth, and look, look what I can do, as I swing into my favorite meters, the ones I've always loved to read aloud and talk about, and look how my meters match my matter. Somewhere after the fifth, I stopped counting. Friday I started a new notebook just for writing poetry. I only got a few lines into this latest piece before I switched to the computer, but watching my pen play out words and lines, scratching, smoothing, sculpting, was such a thing. And to sit copying another poet in the bookstore last night, tracing not just what made me sense but also what made me think about how to write out my own senses--this is also such a thing. My young poet friend said to me the other day that he's been surprised how quickly my ear has turned into a mouth. My other poet friend wrote today to say, yes, isn't it strange how, when one starts to write, everything changes, just everything, about how one relates to literature and to language itself.

This morning and early afternoon, I watched and absolutely loved Sherman's March (1986), about which one of my soon-to-be-Chicagoan friends has written beautifully, in a piece that inspired me to see the movie with simply its first line: "Ross McElwee's Sherman's March may be the most convincingly lovelorn movie I have ever seen." He's right (I mean, not that I can compare it to all the movies he's seen; I'm just saying that I also found it amazingly, convincingly lovelorn, and startlingly profound). You should see it. My favorite sequence of McElwee's voiceover narration comes about two-thirds of the way through the film, when he explains the relationship between his filming and his living. For this bit alone, I might try to teach an autobiographical film course:

It seems I’m filming my life in order to have a life to film, like some primitive organism that somehow nourishes itself by devouring itself, growing as it diminishes…. I’m beginning to lose touch with where I really am in all of this. It’s a little like looking into a mirror and trying to see what you really look like, when you’re not really looking at your own reflection.

I don't think that I'm yet at the point where I'm living life in order to have poems to write; I know that I've only rarely gone out in search of things to write in this forum, and when I have, it's tended to be an exercise that has crystallized something crucial about the day. Which is all a long way of saying that even if I do start living for the poems, I'll feel all right; there are worse things I could be living for.

But some things have indeed changed, as both my poet friends have suggested: I'm taking poetry into myself in a different way than I have in the past; I'm eating it now as a different kind of fuel--again, not just for what it's saying, and not just for appreciating how it's saying, but now for thinking about which techniques feel right for my ear and desires. My excellent novelist friend said to me a couple of weeks ago that if I reach sestinas, he and others will stage an intervention; but he also said, trust your process. My excellent poet friend says, just keep going; think of it like the uncurling frond of a growing fern.

I started thinking of it as being like having a new limb that I had to learn to use, bit by bit; now I'm thinking of it as having new eyes, not unlike the way keeping these writings and images felt like having new eyes. But it is also true that I feel as though I've picked up a new tongue, even in some literal ways; the summer class probably involved a higher degree of spoken eloquence than any class I've taught so far, simply because I'm tuned in to words in a way that's different than what I've known before.

After I watched Sherman's March--and this upcoming bit is really the reason I mentioned the movie in the first place--I decided to take another of my reading baths, and so in I tumbled with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which, you may recall, I picked back up in earnest while I was in Lexington this March, doing the first version of the hiatus project. This early afternoon, I didn't make it very far with Dillard because her prose sounds to me so familiar that it's as though I run into myself and have to say hello again, every few lines. Today, I'm reading Chapter Seven, "Spring," which Dillard starts with an anecdote about having once believed that all languages were simply code for English. By the fourth page of the chapter, she's on to beauty as a language, and I'm hooked (as if I hadn't been already):

Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code. And it could be that for beauty, as it turned out to be for French, that there is no key, that "oui" will never make sense in our language but only on its own, and that we need to start all over again, on a new continent, learning the strange syllables one by one. (107)

Writing again, and especially writing poetry again--for I used to do it, long ago, but it was someone else's voice speaking that work most of the time--makes me feel as though I'm figuring out anew how to figure out the speaking and spelling of beauty. And for these lessons I am so grateful; you have no idea.

By the way: my title tonight comes from Joanna Newsom's "This Side of the Blue," from The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004), another gift of a recommendation from the friend who turned me on to Sufjan Stevens. (This few weeks, in short: a trove, musically and otherwise. If April is the cruellest month, June must be the most capacious.) If you're a folk-pop fan and don't know Newsom, you might want to check her out; her m.o. is quirky vocals over excellent harp. Her voice is either going to grate on you immensely or charm you silly--or else it might seem, initially, as though it's going to make you crazy but then resolve itself into something you'll like a great deal. I'm a fan of her lyrics more than almost anything else: "I have read the right books to interpret your looks: / You were knocking me down with the palm of your eye," in "Peach Plum Pear"; "Do you want to sit at my table? / My fighting fame is fabled, / and fortune finds me fit and able" in "The Book of Right-On." I wouldn't choose her over Sufjan, if I could only pick one of them. But fortunately we don't always have to make such choices. The lines from which the title comes: "And the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers, / and we all fall down slackjawed to marvel at words." How can you not love?

Cleaning down this mess.

My house has turned into a kind of bottomless pit in the last few months, and all I've been able to do to try and keep up with its disintegration is to make neater piles when people come over. But now I'm starting to fear that my life itself is going to start mirroring the house, and so this afternoon I have decided that it's time to invoke Jane Eyre, roll up my (absent) sleeves, and get to work at making this mess right again.

"What aim, what purpose, what ambition in life have you now?" [says St. John Rivers to Jane.]

"My first aim will be to clean down (do you comprehend the full force of the expression?) -- to clean down Moor-House from chamber to cellar; my next to rub it up with bees-wax, oil, and an indefinite number of cloths, till it glitters again; my third, to arrange every chair, table, bed, carpet, with mathematical precision; afterwards I shall go near to ruin you in coals and peat to keep up good fires in every room; and lastly, the two days preceding that on which your sisters are expected, will be devoted by Hannah and me to such a beating of eggs, sorting of currants, grating of spices, compounding of Christmas cakes, chopping up of materials for mince-pies, and solemnizing of other culinary rites, as words can convey but an inadequate notion of to the uninitiated like you. My purpose, in short, is to have all things in an absolutely perfect state of readiness." ....

"It is all very well for the present," said he: "but seriously, I trust that when the first flush of vivacity is over, you will look a little higher than domestic endearments and household joys."

(Jane Eyre ch. 34)

On the other hand, perhaps I will just take to the breezy couch and sleep while I can, while this edgy fatigue hangs on me like a heavy garment it's too warm to wear.