i have fallen in love with a piece of literature, suggested to me by a man on a literary website from a list of books i had read previous.  thank you. 

"...he hadn't realized how much the remote encampment met his atavistic need for clear days free of anything at all like civilization.  This old town seemed a hundred layers of ten thousand decisions, only a few of them even interesting."

 Letters from the Outside #3

"Even the prick of the thistle,

queen of the weeds, revives

your secret belief

in perpetual spring,

your faith that for every hurt

there is a leaf to cure it."

Evening cloudburst. Rain on the oak leaves a white noise that ushers us through to morning sunlight.

Decidedly cooler, time for second seeding.

Hung out with the tomato plants this morning, cut away the spotty yellow stems, noticed the different kinds of flowers and the different ways they smelled when you rubbed a leaf between your fingers. I like when the poodles are here, chewing oat straw shoots and on hot bright days stretched out contented in the shade between the plants. Theyre dense presences, the tomatoes, fruit profuse, huge. Little nasturtium volunteers tangerine petals and blood orange veins. My peacevine cherries with the structure I love in both fruit and flora. Blessed in that the summit of my present expectations is for these to eat.

Bees with their bright pollen panniers in the sunflowers strange year for sunflowers. Ive got a phalanx of runts with their petals already spent and giants their heads still a fist. I have multifloras a few inches high and a foot wide. My Velvet Queens rule, robed in coal feathers, black hearts, petals the color of dry blood.

The cool carries over into today, I went out in sun but returned in rain, infinitely gentle rain you hear in the trees before you feel on your skin and comes and goes like sunlight shifting before and after cloud.

An hour later its late july, the air thick through the screen and smelling of heat.

Cempoalxochitl with a little Moonlight scattered through im thinking planted on the outer edges of the garden, my aztec marigolds five feet high dedicated to The Beloved Dead. Unlikely to selfseed, they require the ceremony of sowing every spring, and the smaller white flowers growing between and beneath like light on the water. I fiddled with the strawberries, broad-leaved mothers begetting with long arms the little bundle of wisdom clutched gently at the ends. I marvel at the engineering of a sunflower. The eyelash daggers swivel open like an aperture, bending back to buttress the huge bloom that frames a bank of futures set down in Golden Ratios for the jays to pluck at in november. 

The perennial borders are evolving, but there are trampled patches where the dogs have taken to lie in the hot afternoons and they are proving difficult to dissuade. unwilling to succumb to something invasive and twee, ill settle some volunteers in and checkpoint charlie the nursery this this time next year. The bleeding heart dog bed may receive the same treatment. And this fall, a rhododendron similarly barricaded to keep the big boy four-leg from killing it again. Overcome with The Tide, reduced to lying on the rise on the indian blanket I picked from the left-behind pile at a Dave concert and I realize im attempting to heal myself with the Sun.

August. Undulating waves of sunflowers and corn against the still green hills gentle sloping a magickal setting for the jewel of water that changes its color with the mood of the sky. A shift in the quality of light, already the suggestion of grapevine and cider. The energy isnt succulent, like Spring, or

ascendant like summer. The energy is sugar and yeast that sweetens and preserves. The root sends its all to the fruit. The fruit is fermented.  The almost imperceptible declension into September.

Homeward driving Dark Star '73 brownies and lemonade the sky changes its mind theres another little oak sprout down in front I show T. he can make microwave popcorn with a brown paper bag.

Dirt roads through a lost kingdom in the valley and on the hill horsehead clouds dogmint the sweet milk smell of thistle. The ash tree we were taking apart by the face cord, the first treestand I stood in wreathed in wild grapevine, the Faerie Fort, Cherry Hill, the cow byre and butterflies. Left one mitten on the hill where the elecampane grew, fireflies thick in the ditches along the road to The Big House. We should have brought a turkey feather and a donut, past the pasture The Black Horse lives in, and the house we fled to leaving the farm. Theyve painted over the red trimming and hung macrame spiral seashell windcatchers off the open porch roof and it shifted some weight off the cowboys shoulders.

After a few days thought and doodling i decide 

Spring is Integration, Summer is Convergence, Autumn is Sacrifice, Winter is Contraction.

Letters from the Outside, #2

Some humid heavy weather lately, but weather changes with the moon, so after sunday we got bright clear days where the air moves cool lifting the laundry on the line like little sails. The tomatoes are huge, and green, the plum I lifted like an egg from under its plant and kept in a glass on the sill moved backwards beautifully through the spectrum to red. Today we perform the sacrament of the first tomato – love and salt and flesh. 

 

All that rain and then this bright heat has caused everything to become saturated with itself. Even the clouds are radiant in their emptiness. I hear the lake has been rough to ride. T. and I took a moon walk last night, the neighborhood cool and quiet, most folks already tucked into bed under the wise watch of stars.

Yesterday I made refrigerator dill pickles, and today I made bread and butter. I picked a cabbage for coleslaw. Made a paula deen bundt pan pound cake, only because it doesnt use enormous quantities of butter which we cant afford. All her photos freak me out, her staring out at you with those fixed blue doll eyes. But I liked her in Elizabethtown. 

 

Next year im planting pole beans. Not only for something different, and I like those jungular (not a word) upright teepees that offer vertical interest, but pole beans are more productive and forgiving, in that, unlike bush beans, they dont morph from bright winsome haricort verts to pale bloated seed pontoons overnight. Or so ive read. 

 

Had my first tomato sandwich this morning with little ceremony, made with romas (not the standard) and not even coffee to go with. The bread and butter pickles were a hit with T., 
for whom they were made. Cowboy says theyll get better over time, allowed to sit. The dills wont be ready for another few weeks. The cucumbers are legion. Next year ill plant pickle-specific cucumbers. These english types just get seedy and huge, even though ill be making them into more pickles sometime soon.

The Druid in me has been superstitious about weeding out the Oak saplings that spring up near their side of the house. Even the unearthing of a fresh split acorn with its forked tongue inspires a panic and prayer as if it were a prematurely cracked open bird egg, the life force revealed chthonic and doomed.

So here it is, four years into this house, and ive this little Nemeton going in front of the birdfeeders. One leader, heart-high, and four acolytes, no taller than my sock. The Oak Reality is setting in, that, barring an Act of God or my intervening Hand of Judgment, these wee sprouts will live to be Mighty.

Im not aware of the implications of an oak tree growing within three feet of a foundation, but I suppose they are many. right off the top im thinking roots in the cellar, branches in the windows and red squirrels in the walls. We have one wintering squirrel which doesnt bother me but an enterprising dray may call squatters rights and ill have moved one square closer to Life as Big Edie.

For Mary Mu and Limpy, wherever you are.

happy birthday...

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."

"An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex."

another one.  for zuzu.  and Golden Boy.



Tenuous at best was all he had to say when pressed about the rest of it,
the world that is
from proto-Sanskrit Minoans to porto-centric Lisboans
Greek Cypriots and and Hobis-hots
Who hang around in ports a lot

Here's where things start getting weird
While chinless men will scratch their beards
Tool their minds to sharpened axes
Brush up on the Uralic syntaxes
Love of hate acts as an axis
Love of hate acts as an axis
First it wanes and then it waxes

(So procreate and pay your taxes)

Ten you us ness less seven comes to three
Them you us plus eleven
Thank the heavens for their elasticity
And that's for those who live and die for astronomy

When Coprophagia was writ
Know when to stand know when to sit

Can't stand to stand can't stand to sit and who would want to know this
Click click click

Who wants to look upon this pray tell

Tenuousness less seven comes to three
Them you us plus eleven
Comes just shy of infinity
And that's for those who live and die for numerology.

for zuzu.  to make up for that.

for zuzu.  hope i havent offended.

"...everything else is unconfirmable rumor, useless, probably lies.  liberate yourself from the illusion of culture."

today rainy i catch up with my tumblr,  bake cookies for the weekend, arrange those cds im making to give away, the tape intensive cardstock flipcase i contrive clever cutty-pasty birthday package for the dark niece in med school.  this house has a bog corner thats like living with a dead body and the book im looking for is over there.  the gaiter im making, these tiny bamboo needles the stitches come off like beads of blood from a pinprick.  and the little pincushion cactus keeps coming up to coax my understanding.  i need to start taking better notes.  

"never buy a cheap parachute."

kin-kaku and lemonade, my sense of intimacy has been completely severed from my sexuality, excommunicated in a backwards baptism, offered openhearted to the failure of good to prevail.  i put all his little tractors on a tarnished silver tray for his returning, a mason jar of legomen and little plastic pigs, helmets and swords and tiny brown swiss.  my boundaries have always been vague sketches bereft of conviction.  the aloes prickly kraken propped up and contorted but they keep coming in tiny terracotta pots, spotted as fawn.  

"the pharmaceutical companies own billions in fast food franchise stock."

did i mention hummingbird food?  i ran out of white and used turbinado and the syrup came extra thick and golden the lady rubythroats are my favorite, and i read the little boys dress in drag for a year before they claim their ascot.  my best birdfeeder is broken i tried to make it do with duct tape ive gone so long without my goldfinches the price of a birdfeeder is the weight of my winter soul. 

"feminism ain't about equality, it's about reprieve."

cookies for the farrier, for the phantom, for the celebrated return of mr. snugglepants.  my hands are sticky, distracting, the floor weeps.  out at sea we sail, happiness off the port side, following unnamed constellations.  the cookies taste like toasted marshmallow.  this week i sweat, and weeded, and read.  i canned carrots and beets and beans, watched a passel of movies (u and dystopian), had very strange dreams.  i decide to name the mixtape cd birthday project "hippie nonsense and liberal propaganda."  the sun returns.

Its the birthday of Edward Hopper, "A man of deliberate habits. He lived and worked in the same walk-up apartment in New York's Washington Square from 1913 until 1967. He ate almost every meal of his adult life in a diner, and he tried never to ride in a taxi. He never had any children with his wife, and he never included a single child in any of his paintings.

Edward Hopper said, 'Maybe I am slightly inhuman. ... All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.'"

Letters from the Outside, #1.

In the winter you were a dark loping form behind bare branches, black dreadbag high on the sightline bringing the garbage cans in. Christmas lights on the Grand Veranda. Living next to you in the spring and summer, I got used to the sound of you sneezing, or what I told myself was the sound of you sneezing. You sneezed quite a bit. And it was a comforting sound, a friendly, human sound that assured me you were just over the creek, puttering around, the sound of your life a happy music.

Im a solitary sort, not much for the company of my fellows, so it wasnt that I felt afraid and you reassured me. It was that if I had to endure the proximity of a human neighbor, I was glad it was you.

So a few days before your appeal I was out in the garden and I heard you sneeze. I took this as an excellent omen. But lo, was I disappointed. I dont care for people in general, ***. Im a pacifist and pray that all are fed and peaceful and free, but I find the company of man jangling. Ive always highly regarded your vibe, though; your quiet, your respect. And your absence is loud, and unhappy.

I split for awhile this spring, but came back clearer.

Thought of you heavy in the spring, in your garden with that radical plow. I covet that plow.

By now its the unfurling bud of crescendo here, the tomato plants lush and resonating, cucumber secret society, string beans. I feel like a Mexican when im out there picking beans in the morning. String beans have not evolved to desire harvesting, unlike carrots, say, or apples. You need to look away a lot or else all the lines start to run. We bought a pressure canner for our anniversary this year and can can can can beans. Beets we got burnt sugar roasted smell with yogurt, pyrotechnic sketches of dill, damn photogenic ruby chard I made into an entirely edible pie with olive oil crust but really not worth the work. I ate the hell out of that pie for a few days, and regretted afterward that there was no one out there waiting to bake me another one. Collards I havent touched but have every intent of eating. In stead of collards next year ill grow kale, for a change. I sorta feel now that if im not willing to eat them boiled to death with pork and an extraordinary amount of salt, theyre almost not worth growing. Cute little dutch market cabbage and broccoli. Strawberries, bent ponderous rarities that I watch out of the corner of my eye so as not to scare the bright pioneers into rot, held in my palm under the maple tree in that wooden chair the dead german from the next town over made, held in my palm under my nose and the breeze through the cottonwood that I watch every summer up there in the sway of green heads and silver bellies, and me just breathing. Some of my favorite smells are coffee outside on a cold day, tomatoes and strawberries sunwarm, sometimes wed get roadside strawberries in a big paper bag and id stick my head in. and tomatoes. *** was tying up the vines and came in and he smelled like tomatoes, like children coming in from the snow it was that kind of smell.

What else? My sage and lavender bed, I wish you were at summer camp and I could write Dear ***, Hi! How are you? Here are some sage leaves from my garden next door. It smells really good, I think, and makes these cool purple flowers the bees love. Hope you are having fun. I miss you.

Its a bad year for sunflowers, man. These are some vertically challenged sunflowers. Well start manuring from that end of the garden this fall, to make sure it gets fed. I tell myself that its a totally new garden, some of it was lawn only a year or so ago, the rest all of three years, that soil is something you build over time, and im building it. But I grew sunflowers that first year that Rocked the House. On the bright side, when I weeded the front sunflowers I found a swath of Tulsi and some cleome. My plan it to just keep it fed and every year plant a few different sunflowers in bare patches and eventually ill have something of a self-sustaining pleasure situation. Got mexican sunflower, Tithonia, in there too. Tithonias a big favorite with me. Just these glorious orange Midsummer Faerie Headdress flowers. Cleome are galactic, architectural, full of empty space. My Delphinium was awesome. Echinacea outstanding in the dry heat. The hollyhock reseeded to my amazement, and the Elecampane I dug up from the empty lot down the street two summers ago is giving me its first flower.

I see the Process, I believe in the Process, and the strength it affords me is called Patience.

this ones for dovie.



if you dont know who zenyatta is (and im sure dovies company is excluded in this), look it up. 
a great place to start.

thank you for nina simone, demallie, and if youre out there, this ones for you.

"Lovecraft's guiding literary principle was what he termed "cosmicism, or, "cosmic horror," the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien."

T. creates a vehicle from legos.  remarkable torque, i tell him, as it is small and towing something larger.
well, its solar powered, he says, and can pull anything that can pull it.

the calm before the zucchini storm.  cucumbers, elegant indeterminate tomato, the miracle of a bean.
the blanket knit and finished, all the ends woven in, thrown into the dryer with some softener sheets purchased for just this occasion so it doesnt smell like us.  on the ride there i rub good feeling into it, soles in the wind, broad humid geology of farmfield, jessica.
i leave trucks feeling calm and peaceful.  it was a weirdly intimate event, mostly locals, that enclosed emptiness i attribute to my hometown.  the event of my summer, and home together for watermelon and onion rings before tuck in, a few pages, and bed.  

the opening band man said you have to give away what you want to receive.  i tried to think of a word to describe the stars.  ripton called them lemon and thats a good one.  sharp, implacable stars.  so many folks never look up at the sky.  the invisible accumulation of clouds into formations you can tell the weather by.  the personal mythologies of stars.  other planets visible with your very own eyes.   spell of dusk or revelation of daybreak.   leaves, trees, sunflowers, hands.  just look at something.  keep looking.

peaceful cooperation, y'all.

sleep off yesterday.  hard to breathe the thick dim air outside.  that late summer cicada sound the alien crescendo over crepes T. and i discuss the Big Bang, spirals, original density. 

chanticleer in a breeze pressed from the lowering sky.  some kind of squash fritter.  lots and lots of rain.
as a child i was not praised i was punished and preyed upon.  something in me suddenly matures enough to understand the pandering.  being born, our channel for Love is wide open, and the cement is still wet when some ineffable abacus rations out woolens and bombs.    something reflective collects in the craters. 

avoidance.  prinking into the abyss.   squash fritters and coffee and talking.  children in the water.  these wonderful shoes.  straight legged angels, nautical genres, the attempt to connect.  glad i dont need the meds, that for the most part i can just let myself be.

"The more you are able to integrate the projection and deeply understand that the light which you perceive in the other is a flowering of the light at the essence of everything, the more you will be able to see the light even in those with grotesque human forms and those whose inner light is cocooned within a dense mass of psychological scar tissue. When you can perceive such hidden lights, you can then see the light shining through all living things and all "inanimate" things as well. Everything is made of light in this holographic matrix of ours."

happy birthday, mr. guthrie.

“Was a great high wall there that tried to stop me, A sign was painted said: "Private Property", But on the back side, it didn't say nothing, That side was made for you and me.”

for cowboy.

there is only one god and music is its prophet.  

derek trucks and save my soul and out there shoulda been skyclad tomahawks and shorthandled shovels and the smell of tulsi and sun on your skin.  mintsprig in a masonjar of heavycut lemonade breeze and birdsong.  

my beloved exhausted batik cut in a wide arc and i sport about in my new shoes the first shoes in a long time where im not constantly aware of my feet.  they are geriatric and not my color and i said to the lady maybe these are made of what everything else now is made of and i just dont know it because i dont usually buy things.  i hope they weather well, and pass those blessings along to me. 

fudge constructed (in this humidity!) our respective cold teas attended to, dishes, laundry, something called livity 

loosely related to Irie, livity perhaps the finger that points to Irie.   upon my cucumber there are many flowers.  the corn is tall and strong with pollen.  i left my columbine seedlings out in this sun and lo, they are compost.  the goose girl gets her oracular garden skull.  more daylily out to the road.   the beans begin.

chrysanthemum sunflower sister mother in the glare i sat out a lot of dances and im almost ready to reenter.  baba olatunji the cowbell sound of the sea, rain on water.

one of those anyone have a bodkin? allergy days where im rendered short and pointless.  trying to come up with some workweek breakfast carbohydrate for cowboy, relaxing into the new method.  the little girls dont mind me much, and the couple are gracious and accomodating.  i eat dreadful snackfood out of nerves and am happy in the customary corner, focused on everything  but faces.  zuzu in town, and an old friend from her new home in the town where we began.   i air out the bedclothes wash the whites and consider preparing the mason jars, which must be done.   is it some invisible beasty seeking refuge up my nose, or the cat that slept on my head?  oh soon the antihistamines will lay their catatonic grace on me.

peaceful cooperation.

a poem of personality traits the online quiz gave me

disorganized, self revealing, rarely worries, likes the unknown

reckless, optimistic, ambivalent about chaos, 

fearless, impractical, abstract, 

loves food, rarely irritated,

strange.

"Tulsi in folk medicine treats boredom, cancer, convulsion, deafness, diarrhea, epilepsy, gout, hiccups, impotency, insanity, nausea, sore throat, toothaches and whooping cough."

shaved, swept, sorted seeds.  i get to smell like myself, we live like humans, like the french.  matt brown and iced tea chrysanthemum sunflower that factory fan i got from my grandfather.  i dont sleep behind a closed door, my dreams have been deep and social.  by the time i rise i dont remember but theres women there, and sunlight.  zuzu knew a woman who would take her words and use them as her own, nest raider, sparrow and hawk.

replant and water, the days heat waning with the moon.  out early for a view of the garden, through the peas like a raccoon, saving the strawberry.  this knot in my shoulder hangs above my serenity like a hammer.  you see the wind passing through the trees but when you go outside it is like stillness moving through stillness. 

happy birthday to oliver sacks who said,

"My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me. "

i hereby adopt this as my battlehymn, ad perpetuum 

(or until the battle is over).

for y'all, as it applies.

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea. 

 

-Eleanor Lerman

happy birthday, marc chagall.

                  "Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love."

something of a last-word clarification.

ta.

"Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog fox gone to ground."

the bat didnt show until we turned out the bedroom light for the night and the click and whir of fledermaus shuffled the air above us and brushed against the cowboys arm.  the bat was cooperative (while i hid under the duvet) and released into the thick night. 

prohibitively hot, but i go out early and water and prune the tomato plants (among these my bonny peacevine cherries and the mysterious white!), pull weeds pick lettuce and peas. when we evacuated the closet, i took the opportunity to organize.   in a plastic bag from a department store that used to be open when i was a kid were skeins and skeins of this blue woolen yarn and some already on the needles.  what i assumed was the frontpiece of a sweater.  my mother knit elaborate sweaters that we used to call fishermen and dont know what theyre called now.  if i had really absorbed it, took it out and looked at it, i would have seen that it was much too big.  but it was only as i frogged the first row that i unfurled it and considered.  so that first row got frogged and i slipped the whole thing back on the needle and bound it off.  and only when it was bound off did i notice the tassel on the opposite corner, and the whole thing came together but then i saw it some more and thought i should have finished it with a border to make a frame so i unbound it and set it back on the needles and then realized i couldnt replicate the border pattern and i looked in books and on the shining interwebs to no avail so im putting it away until i can find and learn the language of that stitch and do it right and i realized it was a way to not be so haphazard the way she hated me to.

we get cowboy a ticket to dave.  my time is dogs and books in the night kitchen baking brownies, tending hearth.  a cool and magickal evening thinking about sweetgrass aleister crowley reading tequila.  serenity yoga sewing machines fruit.  tom waits art dogs mythology. eggs skin atlantis calm.  i feel a fullness like a sleeping cat and a book with the right slant of light through the steam of tea in a mug and the miracle of breathing.  i feel a fullness like carrot wedding cake under a huge spruce coffee and candles in lanterns leading to the sound of water.  i feel a fullness like gravity on the lawn with woodsmoke and the blind sky receding revealing deep dark and stars.  bells babushkas herbs rebirth.  yarn pelicans utica blueberry.  tarot tension grandfather glass chrysanthemum.  this weekend we should stop and i should bring roses, red this time, get tickets, ice cream, incense.  and im happy, and have less and less i feel i need to say.