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Bassoon and pizzicato, Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Clock”, horses at full run. Adagio; Presto; more an ending to a year than a beginning of a symphony. A flute — the big time piece becomes a tiny musical clock, a gift, a minuet for Prince Esterhazy in 1793. The finale is a double fugue. The first three…
It didn’t seem like history. Seemed, more expediency. . . . I’m walking to the beauty shop. On Rugby Road a fractured fume of sodden leaf and Phi Delts’ pizza lunch, and through the pane one of their rout, white-coated, hands behind, waits unattending in the wings, waits out the weary midday to the robust…
Lily, krinon, Susannah, Out of night’s stemless convolvulus, Lileia, choice stalk and throated petal, Out of smooth sand and night’s choicest iron. Through his stilled arms poured buried rivers, Down the deposits of his legs bored torrents. Over his hands the hours subdivided Like foam, a century’s sped lilies. And though the dark room held…
Susan Sontag is down in New York City tonight writing and she wants to explain something to you. She has it sort of figured out, or part of it, and she would like to set it straight for you. William Gass is out in St. Louis thinking and he has a series of connections between…
We’ve read much, we’ve forgotten much. Afterward we unlearned all we had learned — what lead and what gold seals — forgeries, counterfeits, rub outs with a razor blade, a penknife, with gum erasers or a fountain pen; and the new script spreading on the parchment, betraying the usurper of others’ perogatives and titles, the…
The time comes when you count the names — whether Dim or flaming in the head’s dark, or whether In stone cut, time-crumbling or moss-glutted. You count the names to reconstruct yourself. But a face remembered may blur, even as you stare At a headstone. Or sometimes a face, as though from air, Will stare…
Pool tables always reminded me of paintings by Tanguy— objects connected to each other by shadows on an uncertain ground. I would stare down the shaft of light on the stick, distracted by the desire to lie down on the green moss of the table, the desire to treat the balls as gently as eggs…
He took off his watch, wound it, undressed. One movement to unfold the blanket. And he remained like that. He had forgotten something. There was something he hadn’t finished. The obstacle: perhaps that red sack on the chair, perhaps the black cap on the trunk. And automatically he turned toward the dark mirror. Inside there:…
I. The Romantics were right. Gothic buildings are best seen in ruin: sky-sprung clerestories in wild brambles — bare ruin’d quires — Romanesque arches reconstructed by the mind, tumbled-over stones to stumble on in a field of grey violets, in a place you can no longer drive to. When I walk by the Neo-Gothic duPont…
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