Loud Noise

I'm sleeping on the sofa because I just didn't want to climb the stairs. Didn't even turn off the radio and I wake to Chris Smithers singing "Desolation Row", grab a flashlight and go see what it is. Two coons, red eyes gleaming, fighting over a bone, atop the compost heap; I chide them for waking me but they seem unconcerned. There's a pile of rocks on the deck for this situation and I let fly, hit one on the ass, fat bastard screeches and they both run off. I don't mind them recycling my garbage, but they have no business disturbing a dream where I was on the brink of discovering the secret of running water. Get a little taste of single-malt and roll a smoke, think about the day past, with some remove. We had set the front wall with three paintings and two little drawing isolating the center piece, a Clarence Carter painting of two work horses under a circus tent, the horses are white Percherons, lit by a shaft of light from a raised flap behind us, the tent, above, fades to a single vanishing point. The composition is perfect, catching a throw-away moment, two horses facing away from us at an angle, the dark folds of tent barely visible but with some dark colors thrown in with careless brush strokes. It's breath-taking, absolutely beautiful. The other two paintings are very good, also horses, also circus, and the two small drawings serve to separate, but there are almost too many pieces in this show and at some point we add a circus poster to the wall: Buffalo Bill on his white stallion. It doesn't really fit, but it needs to go somewhere. It's a great poster. Sara asks me what I think and I find another place for the poster, in the next bay, where there are also horses, and the front wall regains a more Spartan grace, the Carter, front and center. A circus show, by definition, will be over the top, and this one is, wonderfully, but that front wall needs to maintain a certain elegance. Everything depends on the red wheel-barrow. Those plums I ate that you were saving. Sappho:

As an apple branch reddens
on a high branch

at the tip of a topmost branch.
The apple pickers missed it.

No, they didn't miss it:
they couldn't reach it.

There's a line, a connection, between Sappho and Emily that becomes more apparent to me as time goes on. I'd be hard-pressed to say much about it, but it's there. An acknowledgement of the natural world, a nod to real feeling, not a pose or stance, but that far-away look when you catch someone looking deep into their soul. Plato is probably correct to mistrust the artist, I listen to John Lee Hooker and reason plays only a small part in my response. I'm engaged at a completely different level. My gut responds. It's like Bach with a Roman Candle. The place I long to be. Even merely cutting wood I strive toward the sublime. I want beauty in my life, I reject everything else, fuck it, I don't have the time. Everything else is dross, almost everything is dross. The nature of the world. Consider the crows. Some future space-traveler will find a planet where black birds rule. Or roaches, or ants, or even spiders. Just because you have an opposable thumb doesn't mean you win, a hard shell might be a better advantage. I'm a bad example, but it might give you pause.