Image Credit: Nicole Peyrafitte, KA Kingston (2019). Courtesy of the artist.
[….]
A Shelter Is Not Necessarily An Island
as title for something cogent right now
comes to mind & brings to mind
Eric Mottram’s 1971 book
Shelter Island & The Remaining World
so now is shelter
the opposite of the
“remaining world”
— when the remaining world is
helter-skelter (late 16th century adverb: a rhyming jingle of unknown origin,
perhaps symbolic of running feet or from Middle English skelte ‘hasten’) —
or not? No,
shelter is island
island is always plural
is always already part of
some
multiplicity, an archipelago
“a series of sound groups a local thrush
chickadees at their red plastic spinning bins
active for dark brown striped white sunflower seeds
gull’s white craa and cree low over wrinkling shore planes” (E.M. Shelter Island)
*
4/14
So what is there left
except for the light
of a watery sun slanting
through clouds,
some cars, some runners
all wearing masks except
for those three in a circle
(what is a circle of three?)
(( there is
no way of
squaring that one
except as the four-line
stanza, given ta’wil of first stanza now
in need of being broken up))
based on 6 feet distance
(or lines in stanza closeness)
who are smoking in concert
and that 5-kid family of
orthodox Jews rushing toward
the pier and maybe the water
will part & they can
escape the plagues of New York
— no pharaoh will chase them to no paradise.
*
4/28
This morning’s birds,
no owl in Owl’s Head Park,
but
6 or more
Northern Flickers (my first sighting
after Nicole’s excited reports)
the usual mess of robins,
my gaggles of sparrows, some
common house, some white-
throated, some chirping balls
of white bellies stuck out &
red-brown Mohawks aimed at
the rising sun,
the usual array of doves, never think of calling
them mourning, in or
out of same, they’re just a
bit sad,
but then a ring of doves
with added capitals in English
but without these in the Arabic
tawq al-hamanah is
a major treatise on love
by Ibn Hazm
(to be looked into
when home-in-shelter from
all too rare
dawn birding
walk).
[….]
