VII. The title of this blog shall be, "Bewilderment and Persistence."

Ran into these cows near Stump Sprouts, in northern Mass., a few days ago. It was snowy.

Are they not suspiciously furry?

Perhaps they are sheep-cows?

My new favorite lyric:

What purpose in these deeds?
Oh fox confessor, please...

Sometimes it's time to start looking into Elizabeth Bishop! I want to read Helen Vendler's essay but that's cheating; let's start with a poem, somewhere I could maybe get a wee toehold. Here's the opening stanza and a half of "Varick Street," a few lines at a time:

At night the factories
struggle awake,
wretched uneasy buildings
veined with pipes
attempt their work. Trying to breathe,

Ok.

the elongated nostrils
haired with spikes

Yes. Nice. I'm in...

give off such stenches, too

The "too" is strange. Distance, complaint... later on there's more of that.

And I shall sell you sell you
sell you of course, my dear, and you'll sell me

Oh hi, what's this thing, a song, a refrain? Apparently it's songlike but not a song; Google's first hit for "I shall sell you sell you of course" is "The Flaming Lips will sell you Ke$ha's blood with their new CD."

The second stanza begins:

On certain floors
certain wonders

I like this repetition of "certain." It reminds me of how "other" is used in this poem of Adrienne Rich's, from Fox:

A life thrashes/half unlived/its passions
    don't desist/displaced from their own habitat
        like other life-forms take up other dwellings

Dear internet, what is it that's so lovely about "certain floors" / "certain wonders"? Certain floors; not others. What are on those other floors? No wonders? Or other wonders, different in number or kind from the certain wonders of the certain floors?

"God has heard the cry of our youngsters, saying, 'We are not safe; we are in trouble; we cannot be in the streets; we are not free.'"

This was priest Sully Guillaume-Sam, speaking at the funeral of Shaquille Jones, a 17-year-old student who was shot and killed a few blocks from the South Shore High campus in Canarsie on November 18th.

My article about Shaquille is running in the Canarsie Courier (subscriber-only for the next two weeks); there's also a slightly longer version here.

Take a look at the far left edge of the chart; it shows the percentage of families who earned under $10,000 during the year. The light green line shows black families across Brooklyn. The light blue line shows white families across Brooklyn. See how far apart the lines are?

Now compare the darker lines of each color, again way over at the left edge of the chart. That's the situation in Brooklyn's District 18. See how much closer the two lines are? The percentage of white families that are really, really poor and the percentage of black families that are really, really poor is nearly equal.

On the right side of the chart, you can see that the pattern holds -- though not quite as strongly -- for the wealthiest residents, too.

The data I'm using is from the 2005 American Communities Survey (ACS), which is conducted by the Census Bureau, and is adjusted to 2009 dollars.

L train. They met three years ago, in church.

Went to the Sephardic Jewish Center in Canarsie for Rosh Hashanah.

Lovely moment: services over, the genders can now mingle.

A man is man is unwrapping his tallis. His four-year-old daughter in a pink dress rushes over to him. She is beaming. She runs in circles around his legs.

He unfurls the tallis behind him, like a cape. She keeps running round and round but now she's inside the tallis-cape and she's running clockwise and he swings the tallis-cape counterclockwise and she's laughing and now it's a dance.

Do you know the name of what is widely considered to be "the most emotionally intense and intellectually powerful short poem in the English language?" I didn't, either. Everyone, meet Lycidas.

It starts:

Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more
Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear,
I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,
And with forc’t fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

Irene came. I had coffee, got untorpid, cleaned my room. We filled up some bottles of water and laughed about how unprepared we were. I read some Lear, hoping to use the occasion to get something more out of the storm scene:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow,
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o'th'world,
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once
That makes ingrateful man.

We discovered that Netflix has disappointingly few streaming movies with Spanish subtitles. Children of the Corn was one of the few that does, and it lives up to its title. There are many shots of corn.

Around midnight ran around in Fort Greene Park. It was a good summer rain, but nature's moulds were not cracked, nor were all germens observed spilling.

Later a tree fell across the street. Thankfully not the elegant ginkgo.

The kitchen roof leaked a whole lot. Around 3 a.m. Lucas put the puzzle together and noted that all the leaks on three floors of our house were really parts of the same leak. We went up to the roof and finally found the root of the problem: a hole in the gutter. Luckily, we had stocked up on carrots and Chiclets. Problem solved.