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]

op. cit.

2011©

Saul Leiter
1923-2013
undated

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.

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?