Seattle

Seattle Photo & A Poem By Richard Wilbur

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Today, rousing from sleep, if your first sight was that of a young couple consumed by one another, silent within the silences of conversation, would it be as dark as the following?

I hope not!

Thanks to a reader.

From Richard Wilbur’s ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’

               …“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   
The soul descends once more in bitter love   
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   
    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   
Of dark habits,
                      keeping their difficult balance.”

Seattle Photo-Postcard City & Ye Olde English Shoppe

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In a naturally-induced, mildly Romantic dream-state, I learned Seattle and Tacoma combined comprise the 4th-largest container gateway in North America.

Like a cloud myself, and like a bird below the clouds, I moved through hanging gardens of rain. I landed on a ledge to warm my wings. I shook and cried and became the building, expanding as the sun warmed each stone.

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Partly because of death, love and taxes, partly because some people are forever beating themselves, others, and a confession from the English language, I went looking for the most blue-green grove of late summer I could find.

Somewhere where they just say the sounds of words, and words mean things. Things like deep sorrow and joy, car and ship and tooth. Words full of wisdom and words tied to memory and words seeking each moment as it passes, welcoming truth.

Well…

I’ll take the West African blue note, and this green, green English. Follow the link to YouTube, alas.

As for 80’s pop, and the New-Romantic synth sound, it’s got an older groove:

Looking for ye Olde English Shoppe:

Saturday Poem-Donald Justice

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There is a gold light in certain old paintings’

There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light,
            And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross
            Share in its charity equally with the cross.

Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
At  least he had seen once more the  beloved back.
              I say the song went this way: O prolong
             Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
              And all that we suffered through having existed
              Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

–Donald Justice

Seattle Photo-The More Things Change…

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Some say ‘Delicatessen’, with its 156 minute run-time, is a slog. Three hours of film cut down from eight, taking place entirely within a midday Parisian deli, can be a bit much. Half-heard conversations. A 13 minute single-shot discussion of death, children and cheese.

Others say no modern work illuminates as many centuries of French history, family tensions and socio-economic struggles as does this modern French classic.

***Auteur theory: New Wave theory holds that the two female protagonists are simply puppets for Clement Barreau’s own failed marriages, disgraced career as a pop-signer, and his desire to ‘burn down the Sorbonne and stand like Napoleon within’.

After Clement Barreau’s infamous 1967 Dakar rally accident, his body was returned to Paris from the colonial deserts.

C’est la vie, mon ami…

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***Easily manipulable images and standardized, formalized text are happening right now. Keep your bullshit detectors finely-tuned.

Seattle Photo-File 59

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After the Crime Syndicate strikes on Christmas Day, only hours remain.

Detective Harry Rama finds himself out of free literature, out of patience, and, most importantly, out of time.

A Bellinger True Crime Series Classic.

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