TC: To A Certain Friend

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Forest area and prairie at Cooper Mountain Nature Park, Oregon: photo by Aboutmovies, 2009

Presence comes before everything, even before being
The you to whom everything once belonged
If by everything one means the fullness of nature's beauty
You must remember now that much has been taken from you
Grief too will go from you as from sorrowing songs
Sorrow goes, leaving nothing for you after a while
But the memory of the melody, some old familiar tune
That's lingered on long past the moment you first sailed
Gracefully into the room, as if all the modern languages
Were coming down to me so that I could say these things

Ercall Wood Nature Reserve, near Arleston, Telford And Wrekin, Great Britain: photo by Bob Bowyer, 2003



Moore Nature Reserve, England: photo by andy, 2005

TC: Les Etoiles

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Orion Nebula (M42 / NGC 1976): image made in 2006 from Hubble Space Telescope observations taken between 2004 and 2005 (NASA / ESA / M. Robberto)

These globes of gold, islands of light,
sought by the eye in dreams,
flash up from fugitive shadow
glittering dust on the roads of night,

and the breath of evening dying
blows them away

Heliosheath in Orion Nebula: Hubble Space Telescope image, 2006 (NASA / ESA)

TC: Bach's Booty

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Johann Sebastian Bach at age 61: Elias Gottlob Haussmann, 1748, copy or second version of painting made in 1746 (collection of William H. Scheide)

Three barrels of beer was Bach's pay. Still now
A dim shadow falls across the bright festal tone
As we follow the figured bass part down
Memory lane, where the art form's short term losses,
Simulating his disputes with authority,
Preclude the purple laurels victory brings.
Don't blow your wig, scholar. Let the beer fiddlers play
"The Warrior Minstrel of the Forlorn Hope."
Life remains long, but now and then as the silver
Chords gather and are sprinkled above the planet
Like sparks pinned to a blue velvet canopy
We get these inklings, self regard drifts away
From boreal night's cold lucid frame
Into postromantic darkness, and real stars come out.

Old man with stick leaning on a barrel: photo by Buschgens, 1943 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

TC: The Nelsons in San Roque

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San Roque hub: photo by John Wiley, 28 May 2010

Those bungalows of San Roque
so perfect yet oddly sad
(“a little wood & stucco
to keep the sun out”)
always remind me of
where the Nelson family lived
way back in the days of Hi Oz
Hi Pop Hi Rick Hi David.

Everybody in that family was Okay
every day for a whole decade.
And when Ricky turned out to be
a low rider, it was still okay.
And that’s the way it is today
among the petticoat palms
of Calle Noguera
and Puesta del Sol.

You can’t rain on the parade
of the petit bourgeois
because it doesn’t have one
except at Fiesta
when rain’s against the law.

Ricky, Harriet, David and Ozzie Nelson: photographer unknown, n.d. via lost in transmission

David, Ricky and Harriet Nelson: photographer unknown, n.d.

Lauro Canyon Reservoir and upper San Roque: photo by John Wiley, 18 April 2011

TC: Hollywood Dreaming (Gavin Lambert / Russell Lee)

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Young woman standing on sidewalk with suitcase, Hollywood, California: photo by Russell Lee, April 1942

Driving home, I wondered if there was anything that anyone could do about her. Could the magazines come true, and Emma Slack (with a new name) be made a star? In a way, I didn't care. With her appalling, cruel, perfect egocentricity, it was difficult to conceive of Emma helpless, Emma lost: the little figure behind the palm trees, wandering down Hollywood Boulevard, turned away from the studio gate, listening breathlessly to a retired star's useless reminiscences -- this had to be a game, a chosen role. Nobody could be as naïvely heartbreaking as that. In a few weeks' time she might have to give up the part, with her savings gone she'd take a job as a waitress or store attendant, or go back to the aunts. And it would be all over . . . In another way, I cared a little. There was a kind of fanaticism about Emma, and perhaps this made her really helpless. In a city full of dreamers, she clung with such fierceness to an obviously fragile dream. When I thought of that, she struck me as about the most impermanent person I could imagine in the world.

Sign and ticket window of a large dance palace, Hollywood, California: photo by Russell Lee, April 1942

Russell Lee photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

Gavin Lambert: Dreaming Emma, from The Slide Area, 1959

“It is only a few miles’ drive to the ocean, but before reaching it I shall be nowhere. Hard to describe the impression of unreality, because it is intangible; almost supernatural; something in the air. (The air . . . Last night on the weather telecast the commentator, mentioning electrical storms near Palm Springs and heavy smog in Los Angeles, described the behavior of the air as ‘neurotic’. Of course. Like everything else the air must be imported and displaced, like the water driven along huge aqueducts from distant reservoirs, like the palm trees tilting above the mortuary signs and laundromats along Sunset Boulevard.) Nothing belongs.”

TC: John Ashbery: At North Farm

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La terre rouge: photo by Guy Néchois, 2007

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,

Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?






At North Farm: John Ashbery, from A Wave (1984)

TC: Born-Again Christmas

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Red-capped Plover (Charadrius ruficapillus), Orford, Tasmania: photo by Noodle snacks, 2010

I wouldn't mind being born again as a Red-capped Plover
If I were to be born again as a Fan-tailed Cuckoo

or a Bassian Thrush

a Dusky Woodswallow
a Little Penguin
a Pink Robin
or a Superb Fairywren
I'd be on top of the world
If I were to be born again as a Bennett's Wallaby
I'd be over the moon
If I were to be born again as a Moon Jelly
a Bubble-tipped Anemone
a Venus Flytrap Anemone
or a Zebra-striped Gorgonian Wrapper
life would begin again in a new and interesting way
for I would be beautiful
This old body's is on its last legs
anyway
If it could be born again
as a Red and White Christmas Tree Worm
it would wish you a happy Christmas and be gone
into its feathery Christmas wreath in the deeps

Fan-tailed Cuckoo (Ccomantis flabelliformis), Bruny Island, Tasmania: photo by Noodle snacks, 2010



Bassian Thrush (Zoothera lunulata), Bruny Island, Tasmania : photo by Noodle snacks, 2010



A Dusky Woodswallow (Artamus cyanopterus) parent feeding chicks in a nest at Mortimer Bay, Tasmania : photo by Noodle snacks, 2010



Little Penguin (Eudyptula minor) family exiting burrow, Bruny Island, Tasmania : photo by Noodle snacks, 2010



Pink Robin (Petroica rodogaster), Mount Field National Park, Tasmania : photo by Noodle snacks, 2010



Superb Fairywren (Malurus cyaneus), Male, Peter Murrell Reserve, Tasmania : photo by Noodle snacks, 2010



Bennett's Wallaby (Maacropus rufogriseus rufogriseus), Bruny Island, Tasmania: photo by Noodle snacks, 2010I



Adult Moon Jelly (Aurelia aurita), Monterey Bay Aquarium : photo by Dante Alighieri, 2006



Bubble-Tip Anemone (Entacmaea quadricolor): photo by Nick Hobgood, 2006



Venus Flytrap Anemone (Actinoscyphia aurelia), Gulf of Mexico : photo by Aquapix and Expedition to the Deep Slope, 2007 (NOAA)



Zebra-striped Gorgonian Wrapper (Nemanthus annamensis), a type of colonial anemone : photo by Nick Hobgood, 2005



Red and white Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus) photo by Nick Hobgood, 2005