Coil and Smudge
My unpreparedness become legion, la belle au bois dormant. The cold nickering in under everything, horse nose bucking the piled-up coverlets. Beckett’s final “folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what—” and a birder’s report of “braving” Port Huron’s rough water, wind and scouring sand to scope the lake and rivermouth for the odd gull species, Glaucous amongst. Walk’d a street corner’d by a catalpa, long straight pods ahung black, or Whitmanesque, “beautiful uncut hair of graves.” “Roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed” ducking in out of somewhere with sackbut and cornet flourishes. Announcing what arrival? Announcing no arrival.
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Kenner: “skepticism cannot acknowledge its dogmas: that when statements can have no substance they can only have style. So one goes off aconcerting, to see the tall barrette’d pianist lift one sleek haunch off the bench in musical grimace, the way a cat’ll arch its back into the stroking. Her hands red and chafed. One noted a salutary minuscule contempt in her nod acknowledging applause. The violinist all ball of the feet bounce and shuffle, compensating for being a largish man. And too stertorous emphases, or prettifying the mouth into a little Clara Bow, even whilst pizzicato-ing. Grieg and two Schumann’s, Robert.
