Some sounds once they enter your brain they never leave.
Perfume, “Baby Cruising Love” (2008)
**********
lagniappe
reading table
How little we know,
and when we know it!
*****
We close in on ourselves,
then yelp that the world is awry.
*****
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.
Whatever their differences, they’ve got something in common.
Nobody’s more important than the drummer.
If the drums aren’t happening, nothing is.
*****
reading table: passings
“The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.
*****
“By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.”
For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.
—Jack Gilbert, February 18, 1925-November 11, 2012
The other night my son Alex took me—this was my Christmas present—to see this guy at a small concert hall on the north side of Chicago (Old Town School of Folk Music). We’d last seen him together 20 years ago, in 1992, at a little club not far from where we live (FitzGerald’s). Alex wasn’t even five years old. It was an early evening set, part of a big Fourth of July festival. The night was stormy. The power went out. He played by candlelight.
music clip of the day 