That you are small and compact Like a thought I can hold In the palm of my mind certainly Adds to your appeal,

As does your continual mystery That I run against my tongue Like the word "heliotrope", name Of a fragnant unseen flower.

Yet it is in the hours between Speech that the three worded Phrase uncoils its infant fingers, Yet unamed, and yet growing into

This new life, we now call "ours"

Note: She said read this play, giving him Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"; she said the letter he demaned is written in the guise of marginalia in those pages. She said this is how we shall fashion our town, at the crossroads of paragraphs, in the traffic of books exchanged.

A lovely folk-like song that fits the rainy interlude at this latitude of mine:

"It is that rainy love season, and the wind's noise fills the days again. And the heart dances as if it were a peacock strutting in the woods."

...

I know, my (few) kind readers, I am turning this into a YouTube heavy blog but what to do, my mind is too fractured for compositions more comprehensive. Many things have happened in these parts in the past two weeks: I have had the luxury of sleeping in my own bed for two whole weeks for as long as I desire, the time to read, which I used to eat completely Ondaatje's lovely new novel (I have a set of notes taken as marginalia that I should post here at some point - if Coleridge could turn his marginalia into lectures on Shakespeare, perhaps I can mimic him and attempt something of the same) as well as read lots of poetry (Mandelstam, Ovid via Ted Hughes, Montale, Brodsky), the blessing of consuming slices of New York anew through N's presence which included ferry rides, listening to her recitation of Lewis Carroll's cunning lines at the statue of Alice in Central Park, a hurried romp through the Met, mad laughter at "Gutenberg, The Musical". And finally more recently, the pleasure of watching two fair performances of Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale" and "Twelfth Night" over the past two nights, even as I attempt to negotiate my next temporary geographical displacement - it almost was Birmingham/ London before visa nonsense got in the way, and now it looks like the deserts of Arabia will be where this janissary for capitalism shall find his comeuppance.

Here I go, listening to songs such as this one: "Sunday Morning" by Maroon 5, which are only marginally different from generic radio crap aurally. But then this has somewhat intelligent lyrics:

"Fingers trace your every outline Paint a picture with my hands And back and forth we sway Like branches in a storm Change of weather Still together when it ends That may be all I need"