Number 28

Forests, winds, mountains, trees
are given to us that we may
understand
the human soul
deep-down

             --- Marina Tsvetayeva (translated by M.W D.)

Number 27

In life, one would like to be tenacious as a tree.

Number 26

Gary often tells me he thinks American poet Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) is great writer--though he admits he's been trying to read Patchen'sThe Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941) for a decade and still hasn't finished it.

Yesterday he handed me a book of Patchen's Selected Poems published by New Directions in 1946.  He said he thought I might enjoy it.  I did, and I found this in it (from a poem called "For Whose Adornment"):

For whose adornment the mouths
Of roses open in languorous speech;
And from whose grace the trees of heaven
Learn their white standing

Number 25

There is a certain lethargy in a mature tree--quite a dreamy lethargy--that allows an old tree to sustain itself.

Number 24

Gary's passion for books, always immense, has lately become something even more than that.  He lives with his books as if they were intimate and inseparable companions. 

Every evening, under the quiet light of his bedside-lamp, I find a book reposing on his pillow as if it were a fallen bird, vulnerable and wanting protection.

I pause and look at it, amused.  And with a suspended heart.  For me, it's as if the book were the branch of a tree.