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Settembro Porraceous describes the clear light-green color of leeks Like the lucid green tinge of certain blown glass On the most ancient continent there are only the Blue and the Snowy Mountains, Mount Kosciuszko in New South Wales, the highest point only at 2,228m A stentorian voice intones what it was like to stand on a big rock not so long ago in what is now Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory Watching tubby marsupials the size of rhinos stalked by lizards twenty feet long, and those lizards in turn succumbing to the throwing sticks of the first aboriginals Realizing that Indonesia's Komodo dragons live just to the north as evolutionary remnants of those immense austral lizards Vestiges like the giant tortoises native to the Galápagos and the Seychelles, wondrous creatures whose kind once girded the globe into the temperate zones Species come and species go waiting for Michelangelo Highs lifting from the composting of multitudinous lows Life-size in the Louvre, Nesa Standing, Third Dynasty Old Kingdom, from Djoser's reign 4,610 years ago "...the slight swelling of the chest, the nipples that show through the fabric, and the discreet indication of the pubic triangle.... The left-profile view reveals an elegant silhouette... its slenderness, displaying the flat belly and curves of the thigh.... The inscription... Royal Acquaintance, Nesa" From Dominica, her hair in 'silky locks,' 2000's terminology for hair sewn into a cursive helmet of small, elegant Celticesque tracery medallions, said she would wear it for two months before brushing out All women all time "They died in China" The harvest moon shape set against the Honshu mountain's rearing profile is characteristic of Isuzaki Arata's buildings, as is his science museum in Galicia Architecture as emblem, manifested as enduring, continually visible cultural symbols As in Alaska, Hokkaido and Siberia, buildings are undistinguished, erected against the elements Not so in upcountry Finland with the Finns' extraordinary architectural tradition The sensible, creative, buoyant Finns who slogged it out in the Winter War If Finns could go off and fight their neighbors, then any culture can In another war, the last time mules were parachuted into combat, the battle at Munsan on the flats of the Imjin-gang Crossed those strange riverine saltgrass ox pastures at Munsan-ni looking over my shoulder "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards" Right now talks between North and South to build a four-lane Seoul to Pyongyang highway with a railroad running parallel Straight across the band of the unpopulated Korean DMZ, land abandoned for a half century, probably the emptiest, most foreboding border zone in the world As sinister as the emptiness in Derek Walcott's Arkansas Testament "On a ridge over Fayetteville, \\ higher than any steeple, \\ is a white-hot electric cross." Tutta quella musica The adagio of Mozart's Third Violin Concerto with its alert voice Whitetail deer, brought to Finland in 1934 went feral, now flourish in Finland's southwest Barry Lopez, "Autobiography may become the enemy of your own memory, a self-centered abuse of what you saw" Alsace, Aquitaine, Auvergne, Basse-Normandie, Bourgogne, Bretagne, Centre, Champagne-Ardenne, Corse, Franche-Comté, Haute-Normandie, ële-de-France Long years without coming home from Europe Have punted through Valencia's horta on warm fall evenings, like the coastal marshes of much of the Mediterranean littoral Languedoc-Roussillon, Limousin, Lorraine, Midi-Pyrénées, Rhône-Alpes, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Pays de la Loire, Poitou-Côte-d'Azur, Picardie Death of poetic enthusiasm in the engineered approach of explication de texte "My feeling is that the desire to write is social" People in Puerto Montt dream of going to live in Santiago or Buenos Aires, of spending a year or two in Paris, or Madrid, of visiting New York Tarragon, a moderate green, is yellower and stronger than almond green Her recipe drawings show size by finger joints, amounts with numbers like 5 x 10g, steps drawn explicitly. As in a fine line drawing of an almond, the written "almendras" leading to the placement of the finished marzipan "It was in Spain that men learned one can be right and yet be beaten..." Insouciant Europe living the thirties toward its fascist doom The Isotta-Fraschini from 1931, huge in rich yellow, headlight lenses bigger than dinner plates, "IF" frosted on both A one-of-a-kind Bugatti Petite Royal, cream and black, could do 160 kph Afro-techno pounding out of the boutiques and discount places bare belly T-shirts on Geneva's rue du Rhône in the summer solstice sun After a crash in the Isle de France countryside killing eighteen, with three other survivors he lay in a field partially conscious for hours as local civilians robbed the bodies before rescuers arrived The Army Airforce C-47 took off from Paris bound for Kent in January, 1945 Apple green Probably it's best to live in the near woods, to only travel to the deep woods This age of Lyme disease, beaver fever and AIDS Damien Hirst's thanotopic pharmacology There were six thousand spoken languages on the planet in 1900, three thousand in 2000 The ease with which we reach for mechanical advantage, exact tools readily available for most anything we wish, elegantly intelligent hand tools to stainless steel precision to computer icon flair The Potala was saved by Zhou En-lai from being demolished by the Red Guard The three original peoples who came to be Kazakhs were the Kipchaki, the Huns and the Mongols The ducks and ibises of Egypt with Thoth, god of writing and counting Goatees as worn by narodniks, Confucians and relief pitchers King Menkaure's statue, 4th Dynasty Old Kingdom, 2490-2472 BC, the builder of the third pyramid at Giza, the mien of a running back Confidence totalized While entering the room looking everywhere at once, the celeb writer wore a purple leather shirt over flat black pants, had a pimple on her glabella she'd covered with a dab of heavy makeup An effusive Parisian at Struthof, the concentration camp in the Vosges, gushed about how she had been seventeen at the Libération embracing les Américains Mignonette green is reseda Thomas Platter nearly died in August snow in 1530 on the Grimsel Pass, 2165m. In his prime but almost lost on a trail he'd taken many times, the first when eleven and on his way to Germany to study Classics by night as he begged for his living by day A begger students of the Reformation, who would become one of the forerunners of a whole enlightment culture Students who came up the Inn Valley from the Danube to St. Moritz for the Julier, the Oberalp, 2044m, and the Furka, 2431m, to pass into the Valais and down the Rhone Another pass, the Prasignola, 2724m, remains only a trail that leads up behind Innerferrera and drops to Soglio In Soglio on the Italian border high on a sunny southfacing terrace nearly in the bottom of the Bergell is the palace of a trader who late in the eighteenth century planted a pair of California coast redwoods brought to Europe by the Russians The Nufenen Pass, 2478m, and even lonelier ones, like the Prasignola, that are only jeep roads or trails, like the Diesrut, 2428m, in the Graubunden, or the Passo della-Greina, 2359m, that lifts out of the same valley, Val Sumvitg, to drop south into the Ticino Below the peaks, Wildstruel 3243m, Rinderhorn 3454m, Balmhorn 3709m, Doldenhorn 3643m, BlŸmlisalp 3664m, Breithorn 3782m, Grosshorn 3762m, Jungfrau 4158m, Mšnch 4099m, Eiger 3970m, Fiescherhorn 4049m, Finsteraarhorn 4274m, Schreckhorn 4078m, Wetterhorn 3701m Thomas Platter never made it to Geneva. His son Felix did, in 1552, found the city swollen with Huguenot refugees, met with Calvin with whom he spoke in Latin, and then soon left to travel down the Rhone to Montpellier The year before that Michael Servetus, the ultra-Protestant Spanish physician who arrived in Geneva on his way to refuge in Italy, was arrested by Calvin for his denial of the Trinity and burned at the stake +++++++++++++++ Sampling credits to Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids (The Met, New York, 1999); Kierkegaard; Camus.

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