Ridley Scott's first & best film THE DUELLISTS is on TCM tonight, containing (besides a lot of very crisply rendered landscape) Harvey Keitel as the martinettiest, shortest-tempered Napoleonic officer in movie history, as well as Stephen Frear's fine first effort, the 1972 neo-noir

Gumshoe, with Albert Finney...

Local trees

Wind & Dust in the nineteenth century--

This wind is the plague-wind of the eighth decade of the nineteenth century; a period which will assuredly be recognized in future meteorological history as one of the phenomena hitherto unrecorded in the courses of nature, and characterized pre-eminently by the almost ceaseless action of this calamitous wind...

Jerry Orbach "OFF-BROADWAY"

goodbye to the Trailer Park Boys

Others failed to notice that it was a comedy at all, difficult to believe given dialogue such as the following, in which a drunken Jim Lahey describes his loathing for Ricky: “He grew up as a little shit spark from the old shit flame and then he turned into a shit bonfire, and then driven by the winds of his monumental ignorance he turned into a raging shit firestorm. If I get to be married to Barb, I’ll have total control of Sunnyvale, and then I can unleash a shitnami tidal wave that’ll engulf Ricky and extinguish his shit flames forever...”

Local trees &c.

amiable memoir of a Summer with Empson...

Ancient rashers of fried bacon served as bookmarks in his disintegrating copy of Marvell’s Collected Poems. He stirred his tea with the sole remaining earpiece of his glasses...

Light Night

by James Schuyler

1

A tree, enamel needles,

owl takeoffs shake,

flapping a sound and smell

of underwing, like flags,

the clothy weight of flags.

A cone of silence stuck

with diamonds, the watch

she hunts, the frayed band

broke. It was a black night.

Dawn walked on it, the sun

set its heel. She won’t

find: a boundary of marsh,

the island in the wood.

2

Stoop, dove, horrid maid,

spread your chiffon on our

wood rot breeding the

Destroying Angel, white,

lathe-shapely, trout-lily

lovely. Taste, and have it.

3

In a rain-dusk dawn, the

clearing edge, the wood’s

fangs, the clear crystal

twist of a salival stream,

announce you hence. Tear

free of me, mountain, old

home bone, down sheer fear

tears mossed boulders

bound me, pool, deceptive,

trout-full, laugh and

chatter of finch and pecker,

gargle my liquor skin I

catch your face on. Scar

a look and leave. A rust

plush daycoach unfathers

me. A field of crosses. Let

iron clang iron.

more Schuyler at the November 2009 : Poetry Magazine