river glittering and flashing through the winter trees, the sun shining brighter than ever before, the time I was so happy after my mother promised I wouldn’t have to go to school ever again.
I remember “She knows more than her teachers.”
“What you want is to raise her up a misfit,” my father saying.
I remember liking the word mis fi t .
The times, once a month, that my mother or Edward drove me to Columbia so I could take books out of the university library.
“She is the only person her age allowed to take books out of that library,” my mother saying proudly.
I remember riding down Bull Street and looking out the car window at the long gray wall of the State Asylum, and being aware that there were crazy people on the other side.
Reading poems by Baudelaire and Mallarmé with my mother, looking up the words we didn’t know and writing the English meaning in pencil above the French.
The time we resolved to speak only French together but then had to give it up when we couldn’t agree on how to pronounce it.
French would have been useful, if I had learned it better, had I traveled to foreign countries, as I never doubted when I was small that I would someday, as I am sure I really might have, otherwise.
I first saw the word verdâtre in a poem by Baudelaire.Whistler’s painting of his mother hung on the bedroom wall above the blanket chest we sat on while trying to read poems by Mallarmé, who just happened to be a close friend of Whistler’s, as I mentioned.
A coincidence that makes me want to say something like everything is connected, things hang together, and so forth.
Though I firmly believe that everything is flying apart. Or falling apart. Deteriorating generally.
Though not everywhere equally, or not everywhere obviously.
It sounds funny to say that the little children I see playing in the park are deteriorating, though of course they are actually, if you think about it, deteriorating behind the scenes, so to speak, unbeknownst even to themselves, luckily.
The worm of death is at them, and so forth.
The names Mallarmé, Whistler, Monet, and the rest are left over from when I was a genius.
Passenger pigeons, flight after flight “in countless multitudes” so dense they dimmed the sun, passed overhead continuously for three days, according to Audubon.
The last Carolina parakeet died in the Cincinnati Zoo in the same cage the last passenger pigeon had died in four years earlier, I learned recently, speaking of coincidences.
National Geographic magazine is the saddest thing I have ever read.
An increasingly large portion of my mind is occupied with grim statistics, I have noticed lately.
The fact that 150 million feral and free-ranging domestic cats kill two billion birds every year in the United States, while 100 million or so die in collisions with the window glass of buildings, and so forth, for example.
They see the sky reflected in the glass and fly into it.
You don’t come across all those dead birds at once, of course, in a stack, or all those cats, and that makes it hard to visualize the actual numbers, the 150 million hissing, snarling cats and their mountain of dead birds, Dead Bird Mountain not being a feature on the landscape of Earth.
It is a feature on the landscape of the Planet Dearth, which is a feature on the landscape of my mind.
D standing for Devoid, Desolate, Dying, D is for Demented, and the low Depressing Drone theplanet makes. People on the moon can hear it, I imagine.
A few hundred snow leopards remaining, and so forth.
Ivory-billed woodpeckers, passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, as I mentioned, just to name ones I might actually have seen otherwise, are gone.
Buffalo gone, prairie gone, swamps drained or flooded, coastal marsh vanishing, the elms at Spring Hope dead, chestnuts dead almost everywhere.
Sometimes, waking up on the Planet Dearth, I can still glimpse, blue and beautiful, the true Earth, the planet of Eden, unreachable, infinitely
I remember “She knows more than her teachers.”
“What you want is to raise her up a misfit,” my father saying.
I remember liking the word mis fi t .
The times, once a month, that my mother or Edward drove me to Columbia so I could take books out of the university library.
“She is the only person her age allowed to take books out of that library,” my mother saying proudly.
I remember riding down Bull Street and looking out the car window at the long gray wall of the State Asylum, and being aware that there were crazy people on the other side.
Reading poems by Baudelaire and Mallarmé with my mother, looking up the words we didn’t know and writing the English meaning in pencil above the French.
The time we resolved to speak only French together but then had to give it up when we couldn’t agree on how to pronounce it.
French would have been useful, if I had learned it better, had I traveled to foreign countries, as I never doubted when I was small that I would someday, as I am sure I really might have, otherwise.
I first saw the word verdâtre in a poem by Baudelaire.Whistler’s painting of his mother hung on the bedroom wall above the blanket chest we sat on while trying to read poems by Mallarmé, who just happened to be a close friend of Whistler’s, as I mentioned.
A coincidence that makes me want to say something like everything is connected, things hang together, and so forth.
Though I firmly believe that everything is flying apart. Or falling apart. Deteriorating generally.
Though not everywhere equally, or not everywhere obviously.
It sounds funny to say that the little children I see playing in the park are deteriorating, though of course they are actually, if you think about it, deteriorating behind the scenes, so to speak, unbeknownst even to themselves, luckily.
The worm of death is at them, and so forth.
The names Mallarmé, Whistler, Monet, and the rest are left over from when I was a genius.
Passenger pigeons, flight after flight “in countless multitudes” so dense they dimmed the sun, passed overhead continuously for three days, according to Audubon.
The last Carolina parakeet died in the Cincinnati Zoo in the same cage the last passenger pigeon had died in four years earlier, I learned recently, speaking of coincidences.
National Geographic magazine is the saddest thing I have ever read.
An increasingly large portion of my mind is occupied with grim statistics, I have noticed lately.
The fact that 150 million feral and free-ranging domestic cats kill two billion birds every year in the United States, while 100 million or so die in collisions with the window glass of buildings, and so forth, for example.
They see the sky reflected in the glass and fly into it.
You don’t come across all those dead birds at once, of course, in a stack, or all those cats, and that makes it hard to visualize the actual numbers, the 150 million hissing, snarling cats and their mountain of dead birds, Dead Bird Mountain not being a feature on the landscape of Earth.
It is a feature on the landscape of the Planet Dearth, which is a feature on the landscape of my mind.
D standing for Devoid, Desolate, Dying, D is for Demented, and the low Depressing Drone theplanet makes. People on the moon can hear it, I imagine.
A few hundred snow leopards remaining, and so forth.
Ivory-billed woodpeckers, passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, as I mentioned, just to name ones I might actually have seen otherwise, are gone.
Buffalo gone, prairie gone, swamps drained or flooded, coastal marsh vanishing, the elms at Spring Hope dead, chestnuts dead almost everywhere.
Sometimes, waking up on the Planet Dearth, I can still glimpse, blue and beautiful, the true Earth, the planet of Eden, unreachable, infinitely
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