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The Fire that Consumes All before It.

   I recently tried to make a list based on books i made comments on in letters & blog entries, & came up with 50, 31 of them rereads (something i've started doing since Covid). It's hard for a new book to hit me as strongly in a year that i reread Moby-Dick, Libra, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Kaputt, Doktor Faustus, Dhalgren, 3 collections of Aickman stories, 4 books by R A Lafferty, & Gwyneth Jones' Aleutian trilogy, but i found Priestdaddy the funniest book i've read in a long time (not that i go out of my way to find funny books), & Dombey and Son a great unheralded Dickens. The strangest by far was Betelguese: a Trip through Hell by De Esque (which i read online). The most surpising was Sinclair Lewis's Oil! (basis for the movie There Shall Be Blood) that i really wasn't expecting to like. The most disappointing was Lisa Robertson's Anemones. Not that much poetry, alas, but Seiferle's translation of The Black Heralds has to be mentioned. Also the Sackvilles' translation of the Duino Elegies, & Merwin- The Shadow of Sirius (reread).

Aesthetic Vibes.

"Tridentine gloze"

1.
days of content providing
slow decay of fireworks
garage coolth forever
like a place in the mind
amble into toastcrunch
a setting
the desert at sunup
equations come to life

2.
it matters little where i go
across the uncomplaining earth
the ice that forms upon the brow
comes from the air & thither flies
there is no sun to limn my path
there is no book to tell me how
there is no final bourn or prize
& yet it matters that i know
but were i one to share the gleam
would be to tarry in my vow
erasing the words that make it so
& throwing fathoms in my eyes
a thousand birds here ride the wires
nor are they silent in their watch
& when one leaves another joins
& all that noise remains as one

Rain running down an array of spheres.