“The highest luxury of all, the supremely expensive thing, is constituted privacy….”
Henry James, The American Scene
Imagination scrabbles like a silken pampered mouse –
an elegantly ribboned rodent – riding on a tomcat’s back –
meticulously seeking out the savory and sweet in constituted
privacy: the tender bits – subtly flavored artifacts –
recalling secret acts of bravery and valorous retreat,
and the superfluous: Castilian olives, Sabra pickles, German
cookies – morsels for the grown-up, tending to the darker
richer poles of the aesthetic palate: less the light-leafed
salad than the galantine-de-veau: stuffed and roasted
in a seasoned glow, a loaded dense absorption of too many
influences to be itemized: prizing grunts and thuds of boxing
on the television in the background: tenth round of the first
Castillo and Corrales bout which is the sort of rout of fist
and sweat and blood and love that leaves your world the richer
for its outrage: swiftly turn the page to Joni Mitchell –
singing to a seagull, ministering to her mountain-Michael,
filigree of high soprano like thin rivulets spun off Corrales’
and Castillo’s chests and faces: now the blessed rest
of what the interim requires: disembodied choirs of Fauré –
his requiem, a cool and graceful sensual embrace
of everything the mouse has tasted or will taste: all in this
oddly layered place which inwardly and outwardly is home:
this paradox of stillness and the always-followed urge
to roam: to be another thing entirely than one had been –
and yet the strange apotheosis of whatever always was and is:
offering a mix of what amasses in the bin – beatifying sin –
weighing down the walls between the outer and the in:
letting all disparities consort and make a whole: dreaming,
waking into unsuspected harmonies that make a food –
and fuel – the little mouse can lick up from the bowl:
a constituted privacy occurring once and in eternity:
the strange digestibility of specificities that make you up
today and always in the summer glimmer of an interim.
Henry James, The American Scene
Imagination scrabbles like a silken pampered mouse –
an elegantly ribboned rodent – riding on a tomcat’s back –
meticulously seeking out the savory and sweet in constituted
privacy: the tender bits – subtly flavored artifacts –
recalling secret acts of bravery and valorous retreat,
and the superfluous: Castilian olives, Sabra pickles, German
cookies – morsels for the grown-up, tending to the darker
richer poles of the aesthetic palate: less the light-leafed
salad than the galantine-de-veau: stuffed and roasted
in a seasoned glow, a loaded dense absorption of too many
influences to be itemized: prizing grunts and thuds of boxing
on the television in the background: tenth round of the first
Castillo and Corrales bout which is the sort of rout of fist
and sweat and blood and love that leaves your world the richer
for its outrage: swiftly turn the page to Joni Mitchell –
singing to a seagull, ministering to her mountain-Michael,
filigree of high soprano like thin rivulets spun off Corrales’
and Castillo’s chests and faces: now the blessed rest
of what the interim requires: disembodied choirs of Fauré –
his requiem, a cool and graceful sensual embrace
of everything the mouse has tasted or will taste: all in this
oddly layered place which inwardly and outwardly is home:
this paradox of stillness and the always-followed urge
to roam: to be another thing entirely than one had been –
and yet the strange apotheosis of whatever always was and is:
offering a mix of what amasses in the bin – beatifying sin –
weighing down the walls between the outer and the in:
letting all disparities consort and make a whole: dreaming,
waking into unsuspected harmonies that make a food –
and fuel – the little mouse can lick up from the bowl:
a constituted privacy occurring once and in eternity:
the strange digestibility of specificities that make you up
today and always in the summer glimmer of an interim.
.
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