I lived here nearly 5 years before I could meet the middle western day with anything approaching Dignity. It’s a place that lets you understand why the Bible is the way it is: Proud people cannot live here.
The land’s too flat. Ugly sullen and big it pounds men down past humbleness. They Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and
Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
It opens as a long lamplit evening with Rembrandt, stretched out with the glossy book of his Works on Paper. Brown-petal etchings and drawings: nut-brown, browner, irreclaimable rills
of iron-gall ink sucked and feathered into the paper's wan cusps and culverts. The ink...it's as if there's no pulling away from the wet, flowing line to the tiny hedge-village perched on the edge of the cliff
and the paper. Here the ink's overwatered and we barely, down in the forested loam, disengage the gentle saint, his rounded hat molding
When the dead man throws up, he thinks he sees his inner life. Seeing his vomit, he thinks he sees his inner life. Now he can pick himself apart, weigh the ingredients, research
his makeup. He wants to study things outside himself if he can find them. Moving, the dead man makes the sound of bone on bone. He bends a knee that doesn’t wish to bend, he raises an arm that
The women were divided between regrets for the homes they had left and fear of the deserts and savages before them. —Francis Parkman nothing but this continent intent on its dismay—
The autumn shade is thin. Grey leaves lie faint Where they will lie, and, where the thick green was, Light stands up, like a presence, to the sky. The trees seem merely shadows of its age. From off the hill, I hear the logging crew, The furious and indifferent saw, the slow Response of heavy pine; and I recall
You are a friend then, as I make it out, Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us Will put an ass's head in Fairyland As he would add a shilling to more shillings, All most harmonious, — and out of his Miraculous inviolable increase Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like Of olden time with timeless Englishmen; And I must wonder what you think of him — All you down there where your small Avon flows By Stratford, and where you're an Alderman. Some, for a guess, would have him riding back To be a farrier there, or say a dyer; Or maybe one of your adept surveyors; Or like enough the wizard of all tanners.
Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition Of armoire and table weights, Oblongs of flat light, the rosy eyelids of lovers Raised in their ghostly insurrection, Decay in the compassed corners beating its black wings, Late June and the lilac just ajar.
Where the deer trail sinks down through the shadows of blue spruce,
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