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Novembris Induced to kiss her mother's corpse in its casket on two kitchen chairs in the front room After exactly a year of mourning her father remarried and she was sent to her Aunt Cécile Cécile put candy in her room the first night, it was on her windowsill when she jumped up to close the sash in the morning In her nightshirt with tiny blue flower pattern, saddle-blanket gray felt slippers with forest green piping Most of a century ago That winter she drew a fine map of Canada in considerable detail. The teacher accused her of tracing it and she never forgot the humiliation She feared wolves in the woods on the mountainside behind Cécile's where she went to bring in the cows There were no wolves, only Acadian memories of them Wolves and Indians, Indians and wolves Excuses, symptoms, hysterics Yolk yellow, greener, stronger than gamboge, stronger than light chrome yellow Living near water always better than living at the edge of the woods On Seven Mile Bridge she exclaims at the openness of all the water, it reminds her of Cape Breton South Florida full-sail Spanish galleon cumulus up from the Caribbean Red mangrove, frangipani, paper bark, screw palm, Manila palm, fan palm, royal poinciana, sapodilla tree "That wonderful water with its varied hues, a light shade of olivine runs into indigo that fades into the almost milky whiteness of dead coral. A patch of moss-agate colored seagrass" In old Key West before electricity, starlight cast vague shadows and the moonlight on the white coral streets was extraordinary Gumbo limbo tree, night-blooming cereus, Norfolk Island pine, kapok tree, woman's tongue tree, Cuban royal palm, coconut palm, Canary Island date palm, Latania palm, traveler's tree Bistec Delmonico, bistec de palomilla, empanizadas, aporreado de tasajo, boliche asado, enchilado de langosta, enchilado de camarón, camarón relleno, cangrejo relleno, pollo asado Cuban yellow rice saffron yellow, chicken fat yellow Azafranado Solares Hill Mandingo, Fulani, Hausa, Ibu, Ijo, Yoruba Ñañigo and Brujeria The Brujeria god is Olorum The Ñañigo gods are Ecue, son of Abassi, Chango, god of punishment, Yemaya of the air, Negues, genius of evil, Ñañga, the supreme evil And the Christian god, God Like the white space of Fra Angelico's Healing of Palladia Loft and carry Stand back twenty feet from Gauguin's Landscape at le Pouldu for the vertigo of plunging bank and clouds, the colors erupt. Move in close, the colors go dull and the painting is flat Right now the lake is black bean black with decaying oak leaf tannin Yellow madder is Dutch pink The Doxology came to the Virginia colony, Quaker silence to Philadelphia, Ñañigo from Cuba to Key West Piddocks and limpets, shipworms and barnacles Durrell has died in France General MacArthur was only five feet nine Hay, greener and duller than dusty yellow, a grayish greenish yellow deeper than yellow stone Solenhofer limestone polished slabs with the earliest bird fossils, Archaeopteryx lithographica, graphiced within them from the end of the Jurassic The first feathers All perfectly logical that birds evidently developed from small carnivorous dinosaurs, and that flight developed from the ground up, not from the tree down Out from Miami International below the right wing is West End Point, Pinders Point, Freeport and the shallow swash of Little Bahama Bank Foul-weather gear yellow MIA to EWR Wind over water Parthia traded mainly with China and Rome, and Parthia did its best to keep China and Rome apart And two thousand years ago there were forty distinct monarchies in Bactria and the Indo-Pakistani offshoots of Bactria and Sogdiana Yellow desert dust Wind blowing sand The whole of the eastern Mediterranean's hinterland was politically coherent then, often literate, organized into old and prosperous Hellenistic states Most summers she and her sister drove with their parents from Tehran to vacation on the beach in Beirut, would stop to see her Kurdish grandparents in Kermanshah, then an easy day across to Baghdad before the long run across the Syrian Desert to Damascus Pollen, mostly yellow, from flowering hardwoods powders outside surfaces in May Quince yellow, greener and darker than colonial yellow, greener and stronger than mustard yellow, and greener, lighter and stronger than brass Lascivious laughing faces as Updike reads his nudist story Their clubbish fussiness, taking their clothes, themselves and their smug reserve so seriously, his Waspy fans He has difficulty pronouncing some of the Latin and Italian words he uses Breadbox minds, Northeastern American exclusivity through property ownership, bonds, and holding action stewardship Nearly half of Mexico suffers some degree of malnutrition now As does the West Bank and Gaza Not a matter of regions but of rights ignored, privilege assumed, inequities Venetian yellow is amber yellow The Parthenon, the Baths of Caracalla, the Colosseum, Palestrina's Fortuna. And then in another thousand years the gigantic Gothic A fourteen story building could fit beneath the vaults of Beauvais Cathedral Titian's all-engulfing loft, accession and completion, to the roof, a humanistic universe impossible now to scale, to even manage to perceive Our office lobby and hotel glitz, jerry-built in comparison One morning on via d'Aquino in a November scarlet dawn, crossed the swing bridge to the Citta Vecchia and the station to catch the morning train into Calabria Where they dived for murex there in the harbor two thousand years ago, now there is an oil refinery and a rusty, weedy naval base Taranto was Taras when Lysippus, probably the best Hellenistic sculptor of all, arrived after his patron Alexander died In the way that Iberia was California to the Romans, the Hellenistic California was Magna Graecia Theocritus, that reluctant Alexandrian originally from Siracusa and Cos, held a central ideal of the Mediterranean's naturescape not as evasion but as ataraxy within reach From Taranto on around Italy's empty instep where Sybaris, Croton and Metapontum lay, pass to Cosenza and Reggio as if along some gleaming boreal blank Canadian bay Almond is pale to moderate yellow with an orange tint Theophrastus, author of Characters and Aristotle's pupil, reputedly wrote a book called The Absurd Yellow fat, blue thin Hasuchia is translated as peace and quiet Athens in 313BC with 35,000 resident aliens, 84,000 citizens, 400,000 slaves Epheboi, paides, neoi One in twenty medieval Europeans was leprous and most had other skin diseases In 1400 there was one church for every 250 people throughout the Christian world A ratio still similar across the American South Stepping back relieved after the Ciaccona of Bach's Partita no. 2 in D Minor, she held her violin low at her side as though it were alive Then played the Franck A Major as if entertaining friends The balance, flexibility and potency of the late-century proliferation of Japanese culture is something like the expansion of Hellenistic culture following Alexander Since it has little bedrock other than lava, Japan imports most of its building stone Arch, barrel vault, ring vault, groin vault, dome Kandinsky's Composition No. 6 Yellow carmine is Dutch orange The present modes of scientific research are the theoretical, the experimental, the computational Followed by, some would say, the public relations imperative Belleek is pale yellow, is champagne Cloudy amber is golden green Miro's Birth of the World, 1940 Already years ago coyotes completed their spread back into every state and province on the continent Eyeshine Between Bodega and Valley Ford, Sonoma County on the Marin County line, the big CIA base lies low, fenced like a late-century prison farm Los esteros We pried five gallons of mussels off the rocks below Bodega Head Northern harrier, common goldeneye, northern pintail, green-winged teal, bufflehead, ruddy duck, western gull, California gull, western sandpiper, least sandpiper, sanderling, black-necked stilt, hermit thrush The lake here back east has gone winter dead gray, brown No wolves, no Indians and the South Florida cumulus build almost every afternoon |
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