Water
By Pablo Neruda
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Everything on earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
bit, the petal fell
until the only flower was the falling.
Water is different,
has no direction but beauty,
runs through all dreams of color,
takes bright lessons
from the rock
and in those occupations works out
the unbroken duties of the foam.
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I thought Tuesday was going to be uneventful, but I got into a conversation with Holly Sierra, the artist who is Margaret Anderson's grandniece, that inspired me to pull out the three huge binders of research on The Little Review from college and start scanning material from the Library of Congress and various university libraries that I haven't looked at in years. I sent her letters that Hemingway and Janet Flanner wrote and she sent me photos I had never seen before, and although I realized I still have more work for the scanning project because it makes sense to scan all that research instead of keeping it or tossing it, it was really enormous fun.
It was otherwise a beautiful day outdoors, warmer than Monday, so we took a nice walk before dinner and my usual Tuesday night Voyager-watching and chatting -- this week it was "Distant Origin" which I found a little didactic and scientifically dubious the first time, but it has actually aged really well, given that right-wing denial of factual reality is no longer a bit of a cliche but a daily terrifying reality. Then
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