Friday, March 30, 2018

Old cherries





    It was a good idea, cutting away
    the vines and ivy, trimming back
    the chest-high thicket lazy years
    had let grow here. Though it wasn't for lack

    of love for the trees, I'd like to point out.
    Years love trees in a way we can't
    imagine. They just don't use the fruit
    like us; they want instead the slant

    of sun through narrow branches, the buckshot
    of rain on these old cherries. 












Nathaniel Perry
Nine Acres
  Re-making a
  Neglected Orchard
  [fragment]
2011©


Saul Leiter
1923-2013
undated






Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Onions we are noting






Christopher Benfey offers an excellent essay just now, at The New York Review, alongside Jed Perl's on an exhibition of photographs by Peter Hujar. Renoir on the nature of life, Hujar on promise, possibility, uncertainty, and doubt. Layers of the season.



















Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Hobbies must be doing well





   Many must already have sensed, if
   not remarked, what a paradox it is
   for the big-box brick-and-mortar
   toy giant to have thrown itself 
   upon the mercies of liquidation,
   at the very apogee of fantasy's
   dominion in America. What a moment
   for plunging, with that diverting
   concentration which only a great
   hobby can sustain, into the craft-
   ing of model airplanes, the sym-
   pathies of glue playing a gallant
   part. Is knitting still allowed,
   in the vertiginous free-fall of
   gender-tainted pastimes; and for
   that matter, do boys still gather
   mollusks at the quayside when the
   tide runs out?