Chaucer's House of Tidings, c. 1384

'Then why are you here?' he asked.

'I will tell you,' I said. 'To learn something new, I know not what, tidings of this or that, of love or maybe of some other happiness. For certainly, he who brought me said I would see and hear some wonderful things in this place. But these things I have heard cannot be what he meant.'

'No?' he said. And I answered, 'No, by God! For I have known since I was a little child that people desire praise and a lasting name, although I had no idea how or indeed where fame was achieved until now.'

'I know well the things you want to hear,' he said. Come with me and have no fear, for I shall lead you to where you will hear many things.' Then I went with him out of the palace. And standing in a nearby valley I saw a building so strange that the house of Daedalus, that was called the Labyrinth, could not have been so wonderful to look at nor so curiously constructed. For constantly, as swiftly as thought, this outlandish house turned about and was never still. And there came from it a noise that was for all the world like the roaring of a stone when it is propelled through the air from a siege engine.

And this house was made of withies and wicker, like the material men make into cages, panniers and baskets; and in addition to the rushing noise of a stone, and the wickerwork, this house was full of things hurrying, with loud creakings and many other movements, and it had as many entrances as there are leaves on the trees during the summer and on the roof could be seen many thousands of holes to let out the sound. And throughout the day and night these doors were left wide open; there was no porter to admit or bar the passage of conversation and there was no rest in that place nor any time at all when it was not brimful of news – news of wars, of peace, of marriages, of journeys, of delays, of death, of life, of love, of hate; and lo! this house of which I write, let me make it absolutely clear, was not small, for it was sixty miles in length and although the timber was of no strength it was built to last! – to last for as long as Fortune, who is as much the mother of events as the sea is of wells and springs, is pleased to see it last. And it was shaped like a cage.

'In all my years,' I said, 'I have never seen such a house as this.' And as I pondered over this, I became aware that my eagle was perched high upon a stone nearby, and I went over to him and said: 'Let me stay a little longer, I pray you, and for God's love, let me see what wonderful things lie in this house, for yet, perhaps, I might learn something from it, or something that I will like, before I go.'

(Excerpted from a prose translation of "The House of Fame": http://www.eleusinianm.co.uk/ScotMS/sm11houseoffame.html)

Mr. Toots (fr. Dombey & Son)

cited for bent
afterfeel

here we
go again

caught hell fell
on hard

times all day

graced by glancing
blows no

one saw savor
but don't save

those sweet glassy
notes that

careworn duct

object-oriented
slant-wise

such a forth-
right flannelmouth

oughtn't / owing

to circum-
stance, over-
sight, or timing
conflicts---

be given to
devilish mis-
con-

structions
[things amiss]

motes / mites

"let finish
come to
a haze"

Whether he looked to one side of the road,
or to the other—over distant landscape,

with its smooth undulations, wind-mills, corn, grass, bean fields, wild-flowers, farm-yards, hayricks, and the spire among the wood—

or upwards in the sunny air, where butterflies were sporting round his head, and birds were pouring out their songs—

or downward, where the shadows of the branches interlaced, and made a trembling carpet on the road—

or onward, where the overhanging trees formed aisles and arches, dim with the softened light that steeped through leaves—

one corner of his eye was ever
on the formal head of Mr Dombey,
addressed towards him, and the feather
in the bonnet, drooping so neglectfully
and scornfully between them;

much as he had seen the haughty eyelids
droop; not least so, when the face
met that now fronting it.

(Dombey & Son, Ch. 27)

'We are dreadfully
real, Mr Carker,'
said Mrs Skewton;
'are we not?' 
...
Mr Dombey
in the meantime
stood bolt
upright in the carriage
like a highly
respectable ghost,
looking on too;

while Cleopatra
and the Major dallied
as two ancient
doves might do.

(from Dombey & Son, Ch. 27)

"Houses were knocked down; streets broken
through and stopped; deep pits and trenches
dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth
and clay thrown up; buildings that were
undermined and shaking,
propped by great beams of wood.

Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together,
lay topsy- turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill;
there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted
in something that had accidentally become a pond.

Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere;
thoroughfares that were wholly impassable;

Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height;
temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely
situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments
of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding,
and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms
of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing.

There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances
of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down,
burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering
in the water, and unintelligible as any dream.

Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon
earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene.

Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls;
whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth;
and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way,
and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood."

(Charles Dickens, Dombey & Son)

Thus, clinging
fast to that slight
spar within
her arms,

the mother drifted
out upon the dark
and unknown sea

that rolls
round all
the world.

(Dickens, Dombey & Son)

“Man is an inveterate and incorrigible meddler, never content to leave anything as he finds it, always seeking to alter and – as he sees it – to improve.” -- Christopher Lever

"...it is true continents are partly made by 'trickling increment'; but what is on the whole truest and most strikes us about them and mountains it that they are made what now we see them by trickling decrements, by detrition, weathering and the like...And at any rate naturally said to be hewn, and to shape, itself, means in old English to hew and the Hebrew bara/ to create, even properly means to hew.  But life and living things are not naturally said to be hewn: they grow, and their growth is by trickling increment" -- Gerard M. Hopkins

lip glosses
ingenuousness

nothing incises
the surface here

unbeleaguered
velleities

there's no light, even
spin or leaven

active ingredient
augmentation, an un-

postulated precursor

caulk/chalk :
gabled/garbled :

Allophonics

poor, obscure, plain,
little---"bare ruind"---

refusing abundance
and reams---

not demure/diffident
but reticent

elliptical partial
curious impermanent
asymmetrical

astringent? no---
fascind.

A pitched drone
that alloy-plated

bark
laps against

leather-brown
tongues

Their tidings
hold fast

*
To what
does it
all boil
down?

*
To go
it alone

there-
after

I'm afraid
we're all out

of sorts / we
left no stone

untuned

*
Informed I may
have to leave

my relations

are ill
at ease the current's

infirm
at pains

to make / itself clear

A Thinking Thing

But what 

is a thinking 

thing? 

It is a thing

that doubtsunder-

standsconceives

affirmsdenieswills

refuses---

that imagines also

and knows. 

-Descartes, Meditations

Two Saliences

Thin Puddle

one fingertip’s fraction 

deep spilt across polished

concrete glassy 

continent pristine 

save one single 

inland sea / a yellow

fish-shaped

leaf

Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World

Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
--which what?--something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.

- William Bronk (1964)

Ozu Stills

Shook Ones

At issue were blankets
of sediment, uplifted---

(our ledger
broke lucky: schist)

In what spirit and to what end

that precisionist fathom, "purged
of anecdotal details"---set off,

we ring out, upend each vendor's
angle, keeping time

...
Strait-laced, we saw you lovies
opt for gray-scale prating

Instead, to have say
to make known or do
To cast together feathery-
delicate valves-n-portals

like,
"the spur.....the spar.....the slur

purls, mutedly"