Dearest, up in the aerie trying to figure out what to write (it rarely comes to me very easily). The most glorious spring day today, mild temperatures, got myself to the conservation area for a walk, just in layered sweaters, finally glimpsed the mountains again, muddied and wet the bottoms of my jeans as I made my way around the sodden melted park. So I'm sitting here now, trying to relax myself into some sort of reverie where something will come. Perhaps an image will prompt inspiration, so I peruse images (john koch portrait) and find this one, which (if cropped - three's a crowd) reminds me of you and me. You know, my darling tin man, perhaps I am the witch who did something for you, but you know, you've done a lot for me too, sitting there beside me enjoying whatever song I'm singing...

My darling, I have been feeling so unpoetic the last few days, maybe even a bit self-conscious. It was great fun hatching that post about the chance encounter with a Great Poet - that post almost wrote itself - it came out in a sudden torrent, like a downloading, and only needed tweaking afterward. Which is actually how that mash-up of his and Eliot's poem came about for me. I was having a lot of fun (at the time, November 2009) playing pingpong (as it were) over a period of months on the incredibly witty & brilliant 12534 blog.  Mr. North Fifth Street had posted (as I recall) the My Erotic Double video (I wonder who it is who so beautifully reads aloud that poem?), and I don't remember the exact sequence of events, exactly... except one afternoon something wyścieliło mi do głowy - shot into my head - or as Emily Dickinson would say, it's poetry if it feels like the top of your head is being blown off - somehow I linked those two poems together. They came together exceedingly quickly, in a matter of minutes, almost instantaneously. Most of the tweaking afterward had to do with punctuation (which I don't think I got perfect) and then the final "Peach?" The Ashbery ran out before the Eliot and, as a poetic masher I was a bit like a cartoon character running off the end of a cliff - great what now, where do I go, what do I do, before going straight down?

So writing & inspiration are a funny thing that way. I show up daily - tenacity for sure & hard work (I'm thinking of what Bob Schneider said on his Let the Light In promo video) - well, it's a process of sorts... it would look like loafing to many, searching around for clues, inspiration, wandering around, working out, thinking of you, putting together meals, sewing whatever, indulging spoiled cats -

Let me add that the other day I read an item that four heretofore long-lost letters written by Chopin have been rediscovered and are now on display in a museum or library in Warsaw. I read the item with interest and frustration, because it gave no clue to the content of these four runes. I've borrowed a volume (in translation) of his letters from the library, via interlibrary loan. I've been paging through it, listlessly. I am finding his letters rather boring - though I won't blame Mr. F. Chopin, the fault may lie in the volume as edited, chronologically but without annotations that would help contextualize the notes, to the extent that I found myself looking up Chopin's dates (1810-1849) so that I could figure out how old he was in the very first note, dated 1816. (For future readers of this copy, I noted his dates in pencil on the first page.)

Anyway, Chopin has me beat by a mile in the musician and piano department, but possibly my listy are a tad more entertaining than his. Then again, he was involved with George Sand, a writer whom I've never read - and I wonder what her letters might have been like, assuming she wrote some to him. I'm guessing that maybe she blew the top of his head off? But I don't know details of their biographies, and I've never read her...

My darling, and so I recollect with great joy & delight when you followed me from the kitchen and sat next to me at the piano...

On the menu tonight, sesame baked chicken, leftover mashed potato, salad dressing made - by me - with honeycup mustard, which I whisked together with lemon juice and EVOO --

all my love
listy
but in my mind's eye
when I think of you
illuminations

***
image:
John Koch (1909-1978), Musicians (1937),
oil on canvas, 36 x 43-1/4 in.

Good morning, darling - popping in with kisses for you. Enjoying a lightfilled morning, floral bouquets of various kinds, peaceful cats, and many happy loving thoughts of you. Hope you are having a wonderful day. More later. XOXO

My darling, up here in the aerie with the amorous bonobo best buddies Gwynnie & Claire, who are rolling around on the floor wrestling and outsourcing hairballs to each other as they have been doing since kittenhood. I am filled with scattered thoughts, trying to come up with a post, consulting Ashbery, old posts, posts lighted on, sipping rose, exalting in momentary flashes of sun piercing through the platinum and gray at the horizon where the mountains today (when's the last time I saw them?) have been invisible. I thought of trips to the beach when I was a young girl, we lived a few miles from the Sound, and on the way back when I was very young my father would stop at the Rexall and treat us to cones. That was a happy time, before things went severely bad, before I gained knowledge of his affliction, which did explain his inexplicable behavior. What I'm remembering now though, is delicious strawberry ice cream, handscooped maybe from behind the drugstore counter. Actually, I don't know, this way of getting ice cream was before mall-type ice cream stores. Plus I'd be all hot and sandy and tired from the beach, going in there in a damp bathing suit and sandy feet, thrust in keds or cheap sandals (I didn't like flipflops, they hurt the space between my toes; perhaps I had the other kind, broadband like old man slippers). My father would park the blue Pontiac in front of the drugstore, late afternoon, golden hot sun. I can't quite pinpoint in my mental geography where this was, no matter, somewhere along the Boston Post Road, adjacent to turnpike, and so on a hot golden afternoon, returning sandfilled from the beach (my father still sober), I'd enter the Rexall and it was such a change of environment, like stepping into a bathiscape. It was cold - air-conditioned cold - and there was something minty, flinty, acerbic, sharp - some combination of, I don't know what, it was a time before manipulated aromas for marketing reasons (or was it?). It was very sensory, strawberry ice cream melded with chill mint air of an empty drugstore. I hated the frozen hunky bits of actual strawberries though, they hurt my teeth. And they didn't taste like anything, not like real strawberries. I'd hold each in my mouth and let it melt until I could negotiate it.

We'd always order the hard dark sugar cones, never the pale "cup" kind. For some reason this was a rule.

We'd float back in my father's Pontiac and I don't remember much else. Usually things didn't go well on weekends. But maybe things were okay after such a jaunt. Or it would be with my brothers and me. Maybe I have the time frame wrong but there was a pingpong table squeezed into the tiny one-car garage (the Pontiac stayed outside). I loved playing pingpong late afternoons, towards dusk, with K or M, conversation without words, just bat the ball back and forth, so much less strenuous than tennis, and so mentally intriguing and challenging launching that little ball across the green hardtop, to the waiting pitched arm of a beloved opponent (did we keep score? as a formality, yes, but for me it was always about just keeping the thing going, back and forth, back and forth, with breaks as someone (a brother) fished the eggshell spheres from the cobwebby spiderridden corners of the tiny garage, while I took a break and looked across the way, stepped outside into the cool clear late afternoon, near-evening light, church up the hill to the west, convent (at that time) right across the quiet narrow road, at a different grade, above a steep stone wall.

Whichever brother I was playing with would say okay I found the balls, and I'd return, or perhaps I'm making up this whole aspect of those ping-pong moments. We'd take turns on either end of the garage after all, as well as who served first. It was a safe haven though, a nice space in daylight even as dusk and night approached, before night.

***

Fast forward into the future - hasn't even happened yet - I look forward to being able to take hold of and clasp both your hands in peaceful stillness, you and me together, letting the light in.

Your belle de jour Johanna is present my darling. Touching your hand...

Thinking of you very much, wondering where you are, here, there, or way up in the sky so high.

Up in the aerie. The sun has made an appearance this hour after a day of thunderstorms, some very dramatic, with ominous skies, flashes close by, billowing rumbles, dishevelling winds.

There's a big pan of Sicilian Spicy Chicken on the stove. I haven't made it in a while, that old delicious standby, but many of the ingredients were on the sale rack at the market yesterday: zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, russets.

I finished sewing a second beautiful apron. I've got the hang of it now, third one should be perfect. Not that one needs perfection in an apron, but I did make a few minor errors, for example, setting the neck straps of the bib too close to the sides so that I had barely enough material to turn under and finish the edges. It occurs to me that as a little thank-you for my friends I might make one and leave it for them in their kitchen. I don't know that they're apron people, in fact they seem hardly to cook at all for themselves, and I've made a note to bring down a couple of my dishtowels so that I don't use theirs. But they do enjoy beautiful domestic things, decorative dishtowels and the like, so I think they would be delighted to find a romantic print hanging from a peg on their ancient brick wall.

My darling, I think about you so much you'd be amazed. I lie down, close my eyes, and there you are, I have a whole film just about going in my mind, I keep playing the reels over and over, imagining touching you, imagining your touch. They're fragmentary though, one-sided, incomplete, they need your point of view, everything everything everything about you, the way you feel, what you give -

My love, assuming it's very late where you are, very many kisses good night, in the darkness, in the shadows, in the midst of soft covers and pillows, I lie next to you, loving you.

releasing april 19

My darling, up in the aerie, checking in with you, not much to report, feeling at low ebb, somehow couldn't get the engine started all day, despite two walks though no workout. Dinner will be roast chicken, organic cauliflower (marked down) with a bit of cheese sauce, salad, and baked potato. I am feeling all the more organized for Brooklyn, having found two new pairs of shoes on sale this afternoon, walking shoes and wedge-heeled sandals for the house. I am becoming enamored of a new Bob Schneider song, Let the Light In (lyrics & live performance video here) and wonder about the lyrics, I relate to them. Am I the witch? Are you the tin man? I've heard the song a half-dozen times over the past few weeks and at first it didn't make an impression. KZE would play it and Will or Creslyn would announce that it was Bob Schneider and I'd be like, it was? The song had sailed right past. But a few days ago I heard it again, melted into its swaying rhythms, heard references to the tin man which intrigued me, and looked up the lyrics. Wow. Great song.

***

... Well the lion and the tin man showed up at the spot
The wicked witch walked in said ‘Show me what you got!'
The lion ran for cover and the tin man didn't move
That's when the band started playing this groove and...
The next thing you know there was magic in the air
No one saw it coming it wasn't too clear
And the tin man said ‘I don't know how to do this baby!
Maybe you could show me how'. She said…

Chorus:
All right! Let your hair down
Let your heart pound
Let the light in let the light in
Let the light in let the light in
Let the light in let the light in
Let the light in again!

And they danced in the darkness on the floor
And the world kept spinning round
Like it's always done before
And all the people in club
Said they don't make a pretty pair
But the tin man and the witch they didn't care
No 'cause love don't give a damn about what other people say
It does what it wants; it's always been that way
That's the way it was the way it will be again
Forever and ever amen…!

***
Dearest, signing off now to put chicken in the oven, enjoy the last rays of this A Perfect Day, and catch up with Jerrice on Women of Note. Many kisses, my love. XOXO

Act Two

My darling, up in the aerie after a jaunt a few miles down the road to the local international arts colony for a gallery opening and hors d'oeuvres, not necessarily in that order. As it turned out there were no delectibles to be had and only warm not-great Australian chardonnay. There were perhaps a dozen canvases on the walls of the very room where the Four Quartets discussion had transpired a couple of weeks ago. I walked into the exhibit space, people were milling about of course, including a small group clustered around a seated figure in the middle of the room. I glanced. Oh! John Ashbery, the local internationally famous poet. My - what a surprise. I left the room to gather myself and get a glass of wine, returned and perused the paintings. No one seemed to be paying them any mind, the eminence grise seemed to be the focal point, and why not? I liked the paintings, I did, though all I can think to say about them now is "colorful" and "well-executed." One of them was possibly reminiscent of an updated Chagall with romantic figures about to kiss, along with the head of a steer, crisply rendered.

Mr. Ashbery is in his eighties and was seated in a plastic chair, holding a steel walking stick. He has eagle eyes that observe everything, miss nothing, and as I orbited the room looking at the canvases I took a couple of peeks at him whenever there was a break in the cloud of familiars surrounding him. Through one of these chinks I peered and he peered right back. At another juncture I peeked again - by this time my mind was just racing - and ended up half-smiling at him, shyly. He half-smiled back. I left the room, having viewed the paintings and gotten a load of the very big fish, and figured (though I'd been there all of five minutes) that I would leave, but again, my mind was racing and so I strolled the length of the visitors center, considering what to do, gathering myself, considering... I returned to the gallery space and hovered on the outer edges of the inner circle emanating around his eminence, and then there was a break in the clouds again and something in the meanwhile had been stirring in me and I knew I just had to force myself to say something to him. But I was simultaneously feeling very anxious, trembling (also I had been feeling cold, shivering). And I thought, no I have to say something, I can't just - under my particular circumstances - leave without greeting him.

Within a moment an opportunity presented itself and there I stood in front of him. Of course I recognize you, I said. He grinned widely at me and graciously offered his hand which I lightly shook. Then I said, I once mashed a poem of yours with a poem of T.S. Eliot's. Oh? his facial expression queried, puzzlingly. Yes - it came out really great - Love Song of the Erotic Double - meshingly well! I gestured, weaving my fingers together before him. He looked perplexed, which poem of whose with his - what? Oh - I continued, - and just yesterday I read an interview of yours. Oh? Yes, about your new translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations. Which interview? He had me there. Oh, oh, I sputtered, I don't remember, it was online - the interviewer was a Claude somebody maybe? Mr. Ashbery considered for a moment, then said the name, raintaxi or some such. Yeah, that's it!, I chirped. And I read it just yesterday morning, Mr. Ashbery, so imagine my astonishment walking in here...

My love, do you still want to kiss me after all that nonsense?

Well, I know I want to kiss you.



images:
David True, Act Two: Princess Xperix and Matador José Find Love, mixed media on canvas, 44 x30 inches (detail)

Trevor Winkfield, Shrine, 2009, acrylic on linen, 27 1/4 x 22 inches (detail)

belles de jour

The lady with the cats is thinking of Dmitri, but admits to have been feeling upset and perplexed as to why he couldn't have assumed a cloak (as she would have expected) and left word with the majordomo at the S.B. The way Annabel Lee's wired she can hardly help but take it personally. The starved gnat had thought the request minimal. Kitty still doesn't understand. She and Levin had a lot of face time as I recall. Their mysterious communion didn't all transpire in the ether. Those two, seated together at balls, enjoyed entire signaled conversations "in the language of eyebrows and fingers," to quote Ovid via Guy Lee. All this said, though she has been feeling a little chilled and killed, your islandmountainglacier loves you too and it is hard for her to stay away for long.

More later, dearest. Hope all's well with you.

Pierre Bonnard, The Open Window, 1921, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.