Joyces

This tree in our backyard (in the hills and ravines of Ithaca): stillness.
Forthcoming, an iambic appreciation of Passchendaele and Robert Briffault.
Joyce Kilmer's living went STOP at the Battle of the Marne, in 1918.
There is imagining that at the moment the bullet vaporized his cranialia he wast rewriting the poem of arboria by which he was vaporized by rebuke and doggerel, perhaps to speak of a more carnal form of love; perhaps to think of its eighteen blackbirds.
Gulley Jimson's perishing blows into his wits a blood-pink vision of white walls, carrying into the darkness a last kiss of beginning.
Nora speaketh "yes," because by that point James Joyce had realized that the grammar of Dublin could not be spoken, as so he had hoped, as so in a way he had seen the ways in that city words work to build harmony.

when beauty becomes extravagant

In these times of sadness and woe
as measured by remorse,
as on parlous seas,
imagine that you have lived on a tugboat
for many years,
on, say, Cayuga Lake, year-round,
for even when the lake freezes over,
there are many square miles of open water
in which
to sail and drift.
A woodstove within, by which
you drink coffee and read and write
and out the porthole espy
the hills that form your home Ithaca.
Port.

By which we know that once were written
novels of surpassing beauty:

"Joan’s martinis were made according to a recipe that no one else ever discovered. Even Bruce had never found out how she built them. They were better than any other drink that has ever been tasted by sea or land. They were freezing cold, they were strong, they were subtly scented, yet they did not, like so many special martinis, produce instantaneous paralysis or coma after one had imbibed the third glassful in succession. Instead, they produced euphoria, which in turn led into hilaritas, joyful contemplation and delight. They sprung each individual brain cell into something very like that “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” of which Professor Northrop has writer. Simply holding a glass which contained this fluid had an immediate effect upon the person holding it: he would smile, quite unconsciously, as if in anticipation of his coming translation."