Cross over shame like a wise dove, who cares not for fame just for shy love

Doves, Brooklyn, NY

Life on the Prairie
--Mark Conway

Why do we stay here, sleeping on a dwarf
dream, the subtitles shaky, waking to fish
for loose change? I’d like to go inside nowwhere it’s warm and you never know
what’s next. Under the Big Top
of my mobile home, a survival kit’s included. It’s a real time-saver, what’s more,
it works — I’m spared the spectacle
of the chapped, you know, the portable sky. Inside we have our own dome, sugar
doughnuts, and the outline of an escape.
I don’t find that comforting. But it beats

sleeping on the knife. The meadowlark has
just one song. Clearly, we hear what we’ve
missed. I live here anyway, in a landscape
shaped like it’s impossible to end.


The Founding of Friendship, Texas
--David Daniel

The burial of Anna, age six months,
First dead in the new land,
Was a cause for celebration.
Not only had her soul—they saw it!—
Risen with a flock of scissortails
To join Mary's virgin train above,
But they knew, being gamblers also
On the fleshy souls of cotton and maize,
That she did not, in fact, rise
But burrowed into the black soil
To mingle with eternity here.
After a year of traveling, the family
Could finally stop, for the love of Anna
And the promise of the land
She had become, land that rose so slightly
At the San Gabriel River,
Where the only trees in sight
Shimmer a string of emeralds
On the dusty breast of Friendship, Texas.

Fools of Time
--David Daniel

At seventeen Mary placed her satin dress beside us on the table,
Then she smiled at me and we did the best that we were able.
Back on the dance floor, she seemd to hang in the air like an angel

We were fools for love, making a fool out of time.

Soon I left town because I fell in love with leaving,
And Mary married some boy she thought that she could believe in.
back on the dance floor would could know what we were seeking:

We were fools for love, now we’re just the fools of time.

Last year Mary jumped from a hotel outside of Nashville.
With her dress blown out she must have seemed like an angel of disaster—
Maybe now she knows the things that we were after.

We were fools for love, now we’re the fools of time.

If anyone should ask me if I be a rambling boy, the sporting life I know I have enjoyed

Williamsburg Bridge, Brooklyn, NY

Bert Jansch's LA Turnaround (re-issued by Drag City in June) has been an almost nightly summer listen. "Travelling Man" is the 2nd song on that album. In this vid, the music starts around 1:20.

There's no plan we can fall back on, the road this far can't be retraced, there's no punchline anybody can tack on, there are loose ends by the score

Horses, Cana, VA

Only the Crossing Counts
--CD Wright

It's not how we leave one's life. How go off
the air. You never know do you. You think you're ready
for anything; then it happens, and you're not. You're really
not. The genesis of an ending, nothing
but a feeling, a slow movement, the dusting
of furniture with a remnant of the revenant's shirt.
Seeing the candles sink in their sockets; we turn
away, yet the music never quits. The fire kisses our face.
O phthsis, o lotharian dead eye, no longer
will you gaze on the baize of the billiard table. No more
shooting butter dishes out of the sky. Scattering light.
Between snatches of poetry and penitence you left
the brumal wood of men and women. Snow drove
the butterflies home. You must know
how it goes, known all along what to expect,
sooner or later … the faded cadence of anonymity.
Frankly, my dear, frankly, my dear, frankly

Death
--Bill Knott

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

You held your closed hand out to me, and you told me to guess what you had inside

Dari Ace, Erwin, TN

--a paragraph from Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, one of the books I'm currently reading:

"The other distraction making movement into the Square near impossible is that the Historical Society, in a fit of Thanksgiving spirit and under the rubric of "Sharing Our Village Past," has converted the entire Square in front of the August Inn and the Post Office into a Pigrim Village Interpretative Center. Two Am. Civ. professors from Trenton State with time on their hands have constructed a replica Pilgrim town with three windowless, dirt-floor Pilgrim houses, trucked-in period barnyard animals, and lots of authentic buy unhandy Pilgrim implements, built a hand-adzed paled fence, laid in a subsistence garden and produced old-timey clothes and authentically inadequate footwear for the Pilgrims themselves. Inside the village they've installed a collection of young Pilgrims--a Negro Pilgrim, a Jewish female Pilgrim, a wheel-chair-bound Pilgrim, a Japanese Pilgrim with a learning disability, plus two or three ordinary kids--all of whom spend their days doing toilsome Pilgrim chores in drab, ill-fitting garments, chattering to themselves about rock videos while they hew logs, boil clothes, rip up sod, make soap in iron caldrons and spin more cloth, but now and then pausing to step forth, just like soap-opera characters on Christmas Day, to deliver loud declarations about the "first hard days of 1620" and how it's impossible to imagine the character and dedication of the first people and how our American stock was cured by tough times, blab, blab, blab, blab--all this to whoever might be idle enough to stop on the way to the liquor store to listen. Every night the young Pilgrims disappear to a motel out on Route 1, fill their bellies with pizza and smoke dope till their heads explode, and who'd blame them?"

Maybe me and my shadow can go runnin' in the wind, and we can feel alright again

Mountain Man Flea Market, Cana, VA

Larry Jon Wilson live at Silver Moon Lounge, 2007

Tema

Tema Stauffer, Brooklyn, New York

In early May, I took a trip to New York City to visit Tema Stauffer, a great photographer and even better person--down-to-earth, kind, intelligent, a great listener..not to mention glamorous, savvy, and sophisticated. Tema, thanks for putting me up and putting up with me during my stay. I hope you're able to make a trip to Pulaski in the fall.