BERNEVAL

Gervase Markham in The Well-Kept Kitchen (excerpts of The English Housewife published by Penguin) on the distillations of waters and their virtues notes

Water of radish drunk twice a day, at each time an ounce, or an ounce and a half, doth multiply and provoke lust, and also it provoketh the terms in women.

Maggie Nelson in “The Canal Diaries” in Something Bright, Then Holes

carnival. Pink prints
on white tissue

announce another month’s
passing, inconsolable.

“Inconsolable” seems incongruous. Not so when we restore the context set up by the previous lines. This is about a lament about the passage of time.

I differ. Go to sleep
in anger and heat

and wake again
to the pour
of rain, streets

emptied of their
carnival. Pink prints
on white tissue

announce another month’s
passing, inconsolable.

Later in the poem there appears the sanitary napkin named by brand and described by shape: “the hourglass of a Maxi.” And further on we find in a litany of persons to envy. We encounter envy for those “happy & fat with child” which is linked in my reading to the envy of “those / whose bodies beget / an absolute forgetfulness.” Sets the inconsolable in a different light. Not so much about a recognition of mortality as a keening over what is spent and will not bear fruit. One remembers that Lent follows Mardi Gras and its Carnival. But this is not the land of the Big C Catholics. The consolation is in and of the poem.

And so for day 1500
21.01.2011

William Mills The Meaning of Coyotes “Oklahoma, As You Break to Beauty” not distinguishing the dancer and the dance but widening the circle of perception to perfect the embrace of pointer and pointed. These are the last two stanzas.

There on the snowy plain
Our pointer, stiffened to the world,
Sculpted by desire,
Becomes the geometry of desperate economy.

There with the world’s energy arcing
Between pointer and pointed,
I watch the birds break to beauty.
The design of survival is desire.

It seems as if geometry is positioned against design. The punctuation and the repetition of desire (in both bird and dog) bring into relief the final line and sentence. It seems pronounced upon the whole scene including in its compass the observation of the poetic voice upon the arcing energy. Desire becomes immensely complicated.

And so for day 1496
17.01.2011

Susan Howe in the preface to Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings asks “Can thought hear itself see?”

From a paper inserted in a copy of the Complete Poems at “Whether my bark went down at sea —”

Susan Howe interview with Thomas Gardner in A Door Ajar.

Lost art of conservation reconstructed in the exchange of letters and the inscribing of signs, all told in an interview. An errand by way of ear.

And so for day 1494
15.01.2011