I have had T.S. Eliot as a companion to tell me useful things on Thursday and again today. I am grateful to the University of Nebraska Press for putting out a collection of his essays. Some of the observations Eliot makes in the course of his argument are as valuable as the argument itself. The good sense and insight afforded one therein make him a good companion.

* * *
He is very worth reading on poetry, T.S. Eliot. He has written essays and given addresses on many things. In the volume I have been reading he is thinking a lot about education. I did not find his writing as engaging on education nor did I find his thinking as interesting. On poetry, on poets, on what to appreciate about this one or that one and where, and the things to take into consideration, on these things it is the opposite.

* * *
Beside reading poetry, that is the kind of writing I want to read this summer: the reflections and criticism of poets. I am ready for an immersion now at last. Eliot has whetted my appetite for reading more of Shelley and more of Pound and for perhaps going back to Dante. He has also convinced me to go through Shakespeare one play a week. I have Yeats already. I am halfway through his collected poems and I have some of his prose.

* * *
That we are on the cusp of summer is evident in the weather. When the sun came forth earlier in the week it was still cool and not a thing to be regretted. Today the sun has come in warmth and the corresponding severe weather afterward. The nice thing about severe weather, besides the royal and belligerent clouds rushing through, the copious rain, the hail, alarums and diversions is the ensuing cool again. Last Sunday we had weather warm and humid, and after the tumult of the storms, cool winds and a scrubbed world.

* * *
The sun is good for going in the forest. And when it lights up the fresh, green world it is liable to fill the eye. We stood upon a hill and looked down over a vale in which a channel ran straight, and beside the waters on the rising bank stood a golden wood. The trees were all straight, the leaves all fresh, the green beneath was smooth and it seemed a sacred grove. When the path curved and we found ourselves down in the vale where we passed by a birch wood that was similar.

* * *
Above 70 degrees the shadow in the woods, the breeze flowing in currents like mountain streams both are sweet. We went along ways made dark by trees and larger clouds, winding ways that reminded me of journeys taken by Mr. Bilbo Baggins. And when the sun shone on the forest all above was shafts of light and green, and brown leaves on the floor and dark trunks rising and a view of quiet spaces.

* * *
We walked through a parking lot wild and fragrant with lilacs. If this is not the week for lilacs in these latitudes of Minnesota then there is no week for lilacs in these latitudes. The air if fragrant with more than lilacs, the honeysuckle is peering out of the edge of the forests, and I’d like to say the hawthorn—I think it is the hawthorn—is fragrant as well, but when the crab-apples have finished all their pink and fading festivities, then the hour of the lilac has come.

* * *
Noticeable as well when the sun at last is getting to the end of its long day the hour of the heron comes. So many stately herons move in the last light of day, gliding high, flapping slowly, the sun upon them. There is a mysterious bird—always going with purpose, always going with dignity.

* * *
And then the summer: the hour of the air conditioner. I have some things I like about the summer but for the most part, I endure it with the hope of fall ahead, and with growing welcome for the thought winter.

At Arbor Lakes in Maple Grove a turbine taps the wind. At Arbor Lakes in Maple Grove you will find a place that seeks to rid itself of its suburban connotations with names that are unambiguously suburban: Arbor Lakes, Red Lobster, Maple Grove, Timber Lodge, Olive Garden, Green Mill, Home Depot, Mad Caribou & Los Hermanos Dunn. At Arbor Lakes in Maple Grove you can find the latest fashion of suburban mall: the outdoor conglomeration of shops and restaurants made like a quaint, characterless, and disproportionate small town awash in a sea of parking lots. At Arbor Lakes in Maple Grove you will also find an Irish Pub called Claddagh, a restaurant dedicated to the proposition that Irish cuisine is worth expensive prices. The mark of Irish cuisine is the turnip, and you will not, I ween, find it entirely ubiquitous at Claddagh Irish Pub at Arbor Lakes in Maple Grove. But then, no intelligent restauranteur is usually going to offer something distant that has not been significantly localized.

We were disposed of by two unintelligent hostesses, most small and not so Irish friendly. But they did intelligently dispose of us in a little room, with booth-like benches along the wall, under a window that was mostly shaded away. There was not much padding and the upholstery was rough. The paneled walls were dark and scuffed, the lighting meager, the coat hooks gleamed, curtains could have closed off the room. It was very like, and it was pleasing to have cloth napkins. It is a good place to be if you like the atmosphere, especially before 5PM when there are few customers.

I went remembering their excellent shepherd’s pie, and found they had decided to put it in a bowl–which was fine, and to add pork and lamb to the beef. When asked (an inexperienced waitress, so it seemed, but very ready to serve) I opined that having lamb in shepherd’s pie was not entirely to the linking of discerning persons. I had been prepared to make it my second favorite restaurant, and now I feel I have been betrayed. Lamb in shepherd’s pie!

We journeyed a way up the St. Croix to see if it were scenic. It is very hard to see for all the leaves, alas. We did find a country restaurant with faux-wood table tops and faux-red-leather booths, and everything too low, too open, too cute, and too, too cheap. A man with no remarkable voice was singing a cheap lyric about yesterday and one could not help wishing that today would come instead. What did come were the natives, once we had installed ourselves, and yodeled salutations back and forth, and talked erroneously about matters of fact, and used cliches to make opinions and as occasions to evoke a stock response of laughter. The food was cheap as well, and I ate hearty (a hamburger with nothing but the meat, two fried eggs, the hashbrowns and four pieces of toast of which I disdained only two), dosing up my coffee with obligatory sugar which allows me to drink it and which I actually enjoy. The day was grey and without rain, and as I said, the leaves got in the way. So we cut short our explorations and journeyed altogether using only a quarter of a tank of petrol, which turned out to be the real achievement of the trip.

Albert Cuyp
Portrait of a Lady, 1649
Oil on Panel

After the cardinal,
swollen, red and
unnatural,
and repugnant,
swooning cherubim,
you come away.

You cross into
another silent room
where she presides
with her weak chin
and her long nose.
And with her eyes.

And there you find
her gentle eyes
have been on you
familiarly,
so when you turn
you catch her gaze.

And with her eyes
she holds the room
and also you.
You stir inside,
and strangely feel
recognition.

Her ruff all stands
about her neck
but nothing like
a platter, for there
is in her gaze
a mastery.

Familiar rests
her gaze on you,
as if you knew
her, or rather
she had looked
upon your soul.

And there you think
that here old Cuyp
served something up:
not death, but life,
a sympathy,
made all of paint.

Alternate endings:

1–the Less
it makes his panel
framed and hung
a kind of mirror.

2–the Least
you feel you ought
to be polite
and say goodby.

I have been thinking that in order to work through some of my personal dissatisfactions (dissatisfactions of which I am both subject and object) I ought to inquire into the modern use, abuse and parasite encroachment of the word ‘like.’ Avoiding the plague requires the sort of effort of will, I find, that is distracting in more spontaneous conversation. It would require a mental concentration I find leaves out any spontaneity and emotion—at least the enjoyment of it–for me. The word has certainly defeated me so regularly that I have grown alarmed: hence the notion of an essay inquiring into it, examining the thing in another attempt at rational exorcism. The abuse that has caused my alarm has been around a long while, but my fascination was never fixed on it till I heard it disfiguring the language of a six-year-old girl, much to my dismay.

* * *

But I had the good fortune on Tuesday to stop in at the Crystal Half-Wit and find there a book filled with essays by T.S. Eliot and I have been reading said essays with great pleasure and some reflection. The sort of thinking Eliot is capable, not simply of achieving, but of guiding a reader through with pleasure is a power of a very high order. The first essay, “To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings,” is a brilliant bit of reflection, rather funny, and makes a very compelling argument for the power of love in criticism. “I hope what I have said today,” he writes, “may suggest reasons why, as the critic grows older, his critical writings may be less fired by enthusiasm, but informed by wider interest and, one hopes, by greater wisdom and humility.”

The essay with the most brilliant thinking so far (the which to follow, one feels, cannot but elevate the mind and add to the life-experience if not actually to the intelligence of the reader—and I do feel vastly more intelligent after reading that argument) is the essay exploring what it was three great French poets found in the work of Edgar Allan Poe that native speakers never seem to have found. One is led to his conclusions brilliantly. So well, in fact, that one is left with a slight suspicion all due to the unanticipated smoothness of the ride; but this is altogether without any substantial complaint against his reasoning or judgment so that the suspicion feels like an intuition.

Two essays I am especially looking forward to reading are: “What Dante Means to Me” and “Reflections on Vers Libre.”

In night rain you drive by glimmers, snatching sight between merciful wipers. All surfaces reflect dim lights everywhere. You want a flash of the lines but it is more an intuition to locate your car properly on the road. And this is how my education has left me to proceed, emerging with a sense of having acquired only a sense of what I did not get, and driving, or wanting to drive on the boulevards and wide ways, but uncertain about finding them.

It is part of the human situation, part of the night and drizzle of our finiteness. But part of it is our decrepit age.

Remember the night we drove downtown? We went down and stayed down, going around in the rain. Dark all, rising, light and water and everywhere the circulation of the cars which is our lifeblood—mad and furious.

Zartman I understand means man of softness, or gentleness. Soft like the petals of a rose, this old German lady who was disgruntled with her job told me. We were watch-persons at the Bank One building in downtown Columbus. She would come in to work and leaf through a newspaper looking for a better job. Soft like the petals of a rose, I thought, you stupid old bag. I had rather believe what an non-German told me: it probably means man from Zart. Zart sounds like some distant planet.

In Mexico City, when I was less decrepit than now, the chaps took to calling me La Despiadez. It does not mean The Merciless One; it means Mercilessness itself. It arose on the occasion of a tournament of three dimensional tic-tac-toe, a game for the ruthless, for Mercilessness Incarnate to run rampart. My strategy was simple: nobody ever wins.

It is said that from the penal colony on the desolate planet Zart there have been few outbreaks. There have indeed been few . . .

When I was a wee lad, I watched my friend’s grandmother take a live chicken and butcher it and clean it. I had seen my other friend’s dad cut the head off a chicken and we all watched it run around, but we did not remain for the festivities after. The bad part is what follows, and after seeing more than enough of my first friend’s grandmothers deeds I have been more enthusiastic about processed meats that do not at all resemble the animal. And, as a general rule, unless the chicken is very, very good I like it cooked till it is pretty dry.

But I like KFC, even the pieces. I suppose they come relatively dry, especially cold. I like cold chicken. I think if aliens came and took out KFC it would be a sad day for me.

I enjoy chicken cordon-bleu. There you have the processed deal and you can eat it in a civilized way—with the fork in your left hand, cutting bits off neatly, watching the cheese come gushing out, hoping there will be enough for every bite, stewarding it carefully, wondering whose idea it was to mix ham and chicken, glad that at least they remembered the cheese, grateful in general for everything while it lasts. In Mexico I had chicken cordon-bleu deep fried and it was lovely. I think if the aliens come, they might go there.

I catch the smell of pines
for three pines stand there
on an artificial hill—
and I remember now
the slopes ascending, and
the sun a friendly bright,
and the blue lake below,
and the green pines in rows,
with all the way a carpet
under them of needles
and an endless walk
we never had the time to try.

Spring with all the dandelions in bloom is making the unmowed yards like unsloped mountain meadows. Oh for rising mountain meadows and above the soaring sky! Above the grinning dandelion lawns, less limited the sky is less—and I think it is due to the lack of angle meeting to make it slant and soar.

* * *

With indefatigable toil the people of this country mow their lawns. Nothing wrong with grass, it’s just these people require so very much. Is it a piece of their aesthetic notions to love long, flat, green ground? No, they want space. A part of their satisfaction is to have long seas of grass around their island house. They hardly use their lawns, spending most of the walking on them when they follow after a small, roaring machine. One seldom sees them reading on their lawns, or walking up and down them barefoot or contemplating the unending finished work. The Mexicans and Hmong sit around outside, gather in large groups on lawn and driveway sometimes to drink, to hold a party. But the natives are not inclined to tread their lawns unless to mow them, or to move the sprinkler. Nor do they appear to enjoy the mowing but they cannot seem to be rid of their long, smooth lawns whose general purpose, it seems, is to give the lawn mowers a place to roar. Gardens? Very few, and mostly ancillary decoration to the generous swathes of grass. And if they want to be outdoors they like to build wooden frames above the ground on which to put their chairs, on which to go. The lawn in front they do not use: that is the public face. If they use any grass they use the grass behind their house and often fence it in.

They could have goats or sheep or cattle but they do not do that. And in the undecided suburbs it is probably not permitted. They have a mysterious use for plain and copious grass that is hard to apprehend, other than to measure a palpably long space between their neighbors and themselves, between the public road and the private house.