Earth Tones

Later, the leaves are falling at an appalling rate. Dark morning, thick, low cloud cover. The hollows are filled with a mist that looks like fog. My house is 1380 feet above sea-level and the early morning dew/rain seems to originate at about 1400 feet. I brave an early walk, quickly soaking wet, and it's odd that such a fine rain could get you so wet so quickly; but I had to get outside because it's supposed to get serious this afternoon, "a hard rain gonna fall" as it does, soon after I get home, settled in dry clothes, a cup of tea (smoked black), with my headlamp out in case I lose power. This pursuit of landscape terms has become obsessive. The field mice will be moving inside soon, nighttime temps in the forties tonight, so I get out the traps. The crows are back again and I feed them some left-overs, being temporarily out of dead mice. They seem to enjoy the pork fried-rice. Their easy pickings, down at the picnic areas, are done for the year; now they rely on road-kill and whatever they can scrounge. Late afternoon the sun breaks through in isolated shafts and there's color everywhere. The sumac a lovely red, the orange maple, the yellow poplar, the first Pileated woodpecker in weeks. Black, thinking about black today, is a relative thing. There certainly is the absolute black of a cave or mine with no artificial light, though the eyeless newt might argue; but otherwise even a black crow is hardly black at all. The alpha crow, of the three I know, is mostly green. White, of course, is never completely white, it's usually blue. Pink is just the adolescent stage of oxidation. I like deep purples, but I don't like those violets that seem to drift away. Beckett, Molloy, and his sixteen sucking stones. There's another book that comes to mind, Brian Aldiss, I think, Report On Probability A, I throw a simple frame, a square meter, and I count all the plants within. The average is 137, and I don't think that number means anything. It's just an average number. More rain, like a punch-drunk drummer. Because I hadn't put the Norton Anthology away, I ended up reading some Yeats. Crazy Jane is pretty cool, a comic opera, but the poem that grabs me is Sailing To Byzantium. It's over the top, like so much of Hopkins, but I like the way it sounds.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations-- at their song...

Pound took up that variable foot, then Eliot, then Olson. Dorn, in the love poems especially, is completely transparent. Loki bowling, I'd better go; best to you and yours.