Abraham and Sunny Jim

Family Bible belonging to my great-grandparents,

given to my great-grandfather

by a friend in 1875

I’ve almost finished reading Carl Sandburg’s powerful six-volume 3,400-page biography of Abraham Lincoln. Next on my reading list is the beautiful old book pictured here, after which I plan a thorough study of Milton, followed by Shakespeare. Meanwhile, I’m nearly halfway through Samvel Mkrtchyan’s wonderful Armenian translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Abraham and Sunny Jim — it is that kind of spring.

William Hogarth

Hogarth’s Works, with Life and Anecdotal Descriptions of His Pictures

Chatto and Windus, Publishers

(Successors of John Camden Hotten.)

1874

William Hogarth

Ducks

A light rain fell most of the day. I was as pleased about it as the boy duck and girl duck I saw splashing and drinking in the gutter at the end of the driveway. It’s nice to have ducks in the neighborhood. They flew off, just missing the neighbor’s chimney. Love. What a feeling.

White Lemons

They hung like lanterns, free of leaves, the green ones green, the ripe white, or so it seemed. All were too firm to be eaten, but Willie† picked one and cut it open with a knife, as if, by virtue of a slice, the seasons would change. It wasn’t really a lemon inside. And it wasn’t spring, or any other time. It was a strange grove, that’s all, there for itself, as much as of our longing.

† my grandmother’s cousin

Uncut, Unopened, Unread

Inside

Oeuvres Philosophiques de Locke

(1822, 1824, 1825)

Outside

Irises

Passing through, 2:18 a.m.

How strange to see my father and mother

sitting at our old breakfast table,

the curtain held aside by my grandson

to reveal homemade jam.

Looking out they know me, know me not,

know me, know me not,

and then the sound of horses,

a vision of them leaping vineyard rows,

a dream within a dream,

the scent of dust,

my feet upon

the road.