"My Suffolk Downs" by Melissa Shook

Congratulations to Melissa Shook on the publication of My Suffolk Downs (http://pressed-wafer.blogspot.com/2012/01/my-suffolk-downs-by-melissa-shook.html), about which George Kalogeris writes:

"Melissa Shook's gift combines a documentary-photographer's eye and and ear perfectly pitched for vernacular. Her subject is the backside workers of the Suffolk Downs racetrack: the all too often broken down, troubled, bleak yet enduring lives of the hot-walkers, stall-muckers, horse-shoers, grooms and trainers . . . . Her book is a thrilling integration of common idiom, stoic clarity, and generous energy."

To this I would add: these are masterful photos with wonderful grays; Shook presents the clear, unsentimental voices of workers for whom the track is a mixed fate, voices gritty and gallant.

Up north this year, remembering the snowy winter of 2011, someone protected his trees. These are huge trees. They surround the property, each one shrouded in burlap. After sights like this, it's been freeing to bum around South Beach and see a man playing the violin in Flamingo Park.

And delightful to find this modest statue of Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America. He looks thoughtful among the baobab trees in Collins Park. It's been a day for strolling through parks.

It must be especially lucky to touch wood when it's the wood of the baobab tree.

The post office on 13th Street is embellished with the statue of a fish.

It is, I suppose, unfair to compare north and south, but up north we tend to tighten up, hunch our shoulders against the cold, and prepare for the worst. Yet there is such a thing as overprotection. I wonder how much it cost to wrap those large trees.

Appearances

In South Beach, at the Epicure, I had another lesson about snap judgements. A fastidious woman caught my eye, and I watched her closely. Well groomed, dressed in shades of brown with touches of gold, she first rubbed her hands with sanitizing gel, and wiped the table, on which she spread a clean napkin. How will she be able to eat anything? I wondered. I need not have wondered. Her daughter arrived with a bag from the Epicure deli, and pulled out two huge, thick, rare roast beef sandwiches. The fastidious woman dug in, bit hard, and devoured the dressing-moistened meat, the bread, the tomatoes. All! She and her daughter ate silently, avidly, yet neatly. Not a crumb on the sanitized table. I'm a bit of a crank about not eating red meat--and this meat was red--but please allow me: what could be more unclean than dead flesh? You see how creepy I can get. Yet I'm glad the woman could eat. I had visions of her wiping and wiping, never able to get things clean enough.

I've been away from blogging too long. Many things have kept me away: months of physical therapy, a lingering bout of illness, a departure for South Beach, and writing what I think are risky poems. Right now I'm listening to Callas sing: Casta Diva, che inargenti/ queste sacre antiche piante . . . (Pure Goddess, who silvers/ these sacred ancient plants.) No voice like hers! Callas the Goddess. How did she get that sound out while standing so still?

How are you? What are you listening to. Tell me, wont' you?

Poets Read at Occupy Boston

Yesterday, Oct. 27, in Dewey Square, Boston, Don McLagan tries to keep his poems dry.

Rain picks up. People begin to gather for the reading.

It was my turn. I read "Buying Flowers," a poem from the T'ang Dynasty, which speaks for the poor man in the "emperor's city." As I read this 8th century poem, I felt part of a cycle of voices. Rain spotted the page.

Buying Flowers

Late spring in this emperor’s city,

horses and carts clattering past:

it’s peony season on the avenues

and the people stream out to buy.

They won’t be this cheap for long.

At these prices, anyone can buy.

Showing five delicate whites amid

hundreds of huge luminous reds,

they rig canopies to shelter them

and bamboo screens to shield them,

sprinkle them, stand them in mud,

keeping their color rich and fresh.

Families come back day after day:

people just can’t shake their spell.

Happening by the flower markets,

an old man from a farm somewhere

gazes down and sighs to himself,

a sight no one here could fathom:

a single clutch of bottomless color

sells for taxes on ten village farms.

Po Chu-i (772-846 C.E.)

Translated from the Chinese by David Hinton

J. took the photo. Po Chu-i's poem set in spring, in the imperial city, fits the fall day in Boston. That red umbrella is a rain-spotted peony, and the folder in my hand a big petal. Let's stop there before metaphors taken too far become absurd.

Out

It was marvelous to see this still life in a private apartment near Harvard Square. Someone arranged it for the passerby, kept the shade up. I wonder what happens at night. I wonder whether the still life is lit then.

Duck, horse, church, red tassel, sage, shoebox, carrousel riders but no carrousel. What else is there? What can you see? Not the absent person. Do you make altar-like arrangements like this one?

On another day, this time at the pond: snarled, useless fishing line and fly caught the light.

Fretted leaves make shadows.

October days: I want to be out, in them.

Loitering with Intent

Though loitering with intent, not to do mischief, while reading you, off and on, in the nowhere of the blogosphere, I haven't blogged much. Summer, storms--of various kinds--and physical problems have cut short my time at the computer, but now there are fresh pictures, and a little about Robert Walser's Microscripts.

Above: black elderberry--I think--at the pond, tiny figures in the distance, just the right proportion.

Hard-boiled? The eggs are so carefully placed. Discarded from someone's meal?

Delicate chance mold, mushrooms breaking down all right and finding another form. Words that might apply to Robert Walser's life.

Walser sometimes shrunk his writing to tiny letters and marks, which for a time was believed to be code. He wrote "Swine," an essay now included in Microscripts, published by New Directions, on a slip of paper measuring approximately 3 inches by 2 1/2 inches. Walser's tone disarms with seeming inconsequence. His tone charms me:

A person can be swinish in matters of love and might even succeed in justifying himself to a certain extent. In my opinion, various possibilities would appear to exist with regard to swinishness, etc. Someone might happen to look like a person who appears to be a swine, and all the while he is at bottom perhaps fairly upstanding. One can say with a rather large degree of certainty that men seem to possess a greater predisposition and talent for swinishness than women, who of course are now and then capable of achieving excellence in this regard.

Walser's charm is sly: "achieving excellence " in swinishness. I'll cop to that.

What are you up to? Let me know, please.

Microgreens

Forget about macro. Try working small. There are daikon radish in the green pot and cress in the muffin tins. I punched holes in the muffin tin with an ice pick--easy. Water must drain. Isn't that an enormous ash tray?! Repurposing--awful word--is satisfying.

Fiona Hill's book, "Microgreens," is my guide, and already I've tasted a cress leaf, a primary one, but will be patient and wait until the secondary leaves come in.

Though I like working small, I don't want to shrink. My friend R., who has been lifting weights for years, is doing well at eighty! I've begun to lift at a local class and like it. I'm working with small weights, a present from J., They are red, my color.

What are you growing?