The Dead
— I’ve been thinking about the dead a lot lately. Trying to count them up, in a way. You get older and you have more of the dead around you than the living most days. You know them better and you keep knowing them, the dead, even though they don’t know you back. Sometimes I forget who’s gone, and my writer friends, I talk to them in their books where they live on.
— Last week I talked about reading Franz Wright’s last book which was published posthumously. Nick Cave’s book of interviews. This week I’ve been reading Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost. Walking with the dead, walking with the living, toward life, toward an unexpected love. In this review of the book, the reminder that Ammons taught that “the poem is a walk” or a series of walks. Lines from the book, “What she wanted was to flourish.” “Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.”
— The epigraph to Sean Thomas Dougherty’s book The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things is by Marilyn Hacker: “I can only bear witness for my own / dead & dying, whom I’ve often failed.”
— From the poem "When I Listen” by Dougherty:
to Thelonious Monk,
I think he transforms fear
into revere & rearranges it
into something more like reverie
— Have you read Fernando Pessoa’s poems? Here is an excerpt of one I love written in and around 1935, titled “Advice.”
Surround who you dream you are with high walls.
Then, wherever the garden can be seen
Through the iron bars of the gate,
Plant only the most cheerful flowers,
So that you’ll be known as a cheerful sort.
Where it can’t be seen, don’t plant anything.”
— Pessoa goes on to advise that you turn yourself into a well-guarded double self. The garden of yourself is showy, but behind the scenes, a straggly wild flora abounds.
— This past week we watched an amazing film: Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, starring Josh O’Connor and Isabella Rossellini. Reviews here and here. As usual my copy came from the biblioteca. What little I knew about the film I’d forgotten between placing my hold on it and waiting for it to arrive months later. That feeling of being released from jail at the beginning and then being on a train…..seems so symbolic of so much. A dream you had once. The whole film feels like a dream, descents into the underworld, thefts, losses, running…
— Reader, my review: I loved the film.
— chimera | kīˈmirə, kəˈmirə | (also chimaera) noun1 (Chimera) (in Greek mythology) a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. • any mythical animal with parts taken from various animals. 2 a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve
— Maybe it’s all of these things rattling around in my head, so that this morning I drew the angel below, as always in conversation with myself, advice to myself.
— The text reads:
Advice
Translate loneliness into loveliness. Into transcendence.
Translate flowers into the original axe and back again.
Take the flower test and pass with flying colours.
Heartstorm a garden out of thin air.
Be a mystery of many petals, many feathers.
Use everything you are.
Translate slights into light. Into LOVE.
— I had also been thinking about the apple test, again. And the really excellent quotation by Georgia O’Keeffe, which has become so commonplace, we likely can’t even hear it anymore: “Nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small it takes time — we haven't time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
— Thinking about transforming into a flower or a bouquet of splendour. Thinking about becoming a professor again at the University of Oblivion and assigning the flower test, class after class.
— Dear Franz Wright and Michael Ondaatje: There’s a trick with an axe I’m trying to do. Please send flowers. There’s a dream I revere of an invisible garden in which the prima donna rat hermits are trimming their bonnets amid bouquets of splendour.
August 7, 2026
— All photos by me, taken on my Fujifilm Xt4 held together by duct tape and love. The exception being the angel drawing taken with my iPhone in my backyard.
