dig

Author: dig

  • A cosmic note

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    A creamy tear descended here when Cupid squeezed the teat
    of Venus. Dripping down the Milky Way it puddled beneath
    old oak, new pine. Love’s selfish thirst did pluck a cosmic note,
    set every entombed entangled bit of me in roots both new
    and old to singing. I was become in earth and by harmony
    a million bits of tongue and ear, sound funnels upwhorled
    in song conducting cones. Fresh music from old flesh
    corrected my (most melancholy) record of this last go round
    the planet. Now I was first things: elementals, vegetable
    and mineral in form, dust to kick it on the breeze,
    loam to feed old oak, new pine, Eros-greedy energy
    on hunt for nourishment, cream to suck, breast to squeeze.

    Orbit Music, Jennifer Moxley

    Broken Promises in Cuban Miami, Ada Ferrer and Miriam Pensack (New York Review)

    The LRB Podcast, Poetry and the Turning World: Divorce (Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘The Divorce’, Anne Carson’s The Beauty of a Husband , ‘The Mpemba Effect’, Isabelle Baafi)

    The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, Anne Carson.

      “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all

            Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

    Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats

  • Our vast array

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    A detail of Julie Mehretu’s site-specific diptych, OWL, eon (I, II), 2017. SFMOMA’s Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium.

    “GG [Gary Garrels]: In 2008 we approached Kerry James Marshall about making new works for those walls. I had done a show here with Kerry James in the 1990s, so we already had a wonderful relationship of long standing. He decided he wanted to do something in dialogue with San Francisco’s venerable Mission mural tradition. He began discussions with Precita Eyes and came up with a plan to create views of the plantations of George Washington (Mount Vernon) and Thomas Jefferson (Monticello), but with black figures inserted. The intent was to point to the presence of black Americans on the plantations, while highlighting their absence from public history. The murals were fabulous.”

    Spinning through space for eons,
    our earth—oceans, rivers, mountains,
    glaciers, tigers, parrots, redwoods—
    evolving wonders.

    And our vast array, generations
    of humans—all shapes, colors, languages.

        Can I be the only me?

    Our earth: so much beauty, hate,
    goodness, greed.

    “Study. Cool the climate,” advises my teacher.
    “Grow peace.”

        Can I be the only me,
                  become all my unique complexity?

    The Only Me, Pat Mora

  • small as he is

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    The mosquito knows full well, small as he is
    he’s a beast of prey.
    But after all
    he only takes     his bellyful,
    he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

    The Mosquito Knows, D. H. Lawrence

    Norway – Brazil 2 -1.

  • walk garlanded in wisteria

    The Thicket. 2024. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Ray Suen.

    Jack & Lula, 4:42

    Franz Schubert, Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940, 5:40 (Ray Suen · Thomas Nickell, Piano)

    I will get me to the wood
    Where the gods walk garlanded in wisteria,
    By the silver-blue flood move others with ivory cars.
    There come forth many maidens
    to gather grapes for the leopards, my friend.
    For there are leopards drawing the cars.

    I will walk in the glade,
    I will come out of the new thicket
    and accost the procession of maidens.

    After Ch’u Yuan, Ezra Pound

  • AG2026_1830372a sways to the tune

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    Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
    Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
    I heard a Negro play.
    Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
    By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
    He did a lazy sway. . . .
    He did a lazy sway. . . .
    To the tune     o’ those Weary Blues.
    With his ebony hands on each ivory key
    He made that poor piano moan with melody.
    O Blues!
    Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
    He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
    Sweet Blues!
    Coming from a black man’s soul.
    O Blues!
    In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
    I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
    “Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
    Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
    I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
    And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

    Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
    He played a few chords then he sang some more—
    “I got the Weary Blues
    And I can’t be satisfied.
    Got the Weary Blues
    And can’t be satisfied—
    I ain’t happy no mo’
    And I wish that I had died.”
    And far into the night he crooned that tune.
    The stars went out and so did the moon.
    The singer stopped playing and went to bed
    While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
    He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

    The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes

  • AG2026_MG_7479a or lush and bare

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    Jacob Lawrence
    Could paint
    The beauty
    Of ?bareness

    Blacks
    Moved North
    Leaving
    Empty
    Rooms
    Behind
    Them

    Lawrence’s genius
    Was to paint
    Those rooms
    Left behind

    Brown bare
    Wooden rooms
    Light brown plank walls
    Dark brown plank floors

    A single dark green
    Shade
    Covering
    The window
    Erasing the lush landscape

    Creating a
    Stark beauty
    A simple beauty
    A bare beauty

    The Beauty of Bareness, William J. Harris

  • AG2026_MG_8350a as wish fulfillment

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    exhibition has been put together by the team behind the DRAW Project. Based on a proposal by Rafael Domenech, Sonia Rosa Kahn, Loïc Le Gall, Alejandro Valencia. This exhibition is supported by 193 Gallery, Paris. July 3 — October 17 2026.

    Pleasure is paramount for literary theorist Northrop Frye’s definition of romance, as wish fulfillment: “[T]he quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality.”

    the pleasures of genre and romance are the smooth operators of recurrence and relief, certainty. So unlike life, this smoothness swoons on the weft for expectations and the warp of their fulfillment, pleasure with insurance.

    We repeat aesthetic pleasure, we repeat as aesthetic pleasure, because repetition is a—the—truth of psychic life.

    Love’s Work, Anna Kornbluh (Parapraxis)

  • AG2026_MG_7403a or the weight of my life

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    He was as a god,
    stepped out of eternal dream
    along the boardwalk.

    He looked at my girl,
    a dream to herself and
    that was the end of them.

    They disappeared beside the sea
    at Revere Beach as
    I aint seen them since.

    If you find anyone
    answering their description
    please let me know. I need them

    to carry the weight of my life
    The old gods are gone. What lives on
    in my heart

    is their flesh
    like a wound,
    a tomb, a bomb.

    Billie, John Wieners