D.E. STEWARD
Como un Niño
Soviet bicycles often lacked tubes with valve cores so kids would pump up hard, take the
pump hose off fast and jam a bar of soap on the valve stem to hold the air as they screwed
a cap on
“Desde niño pintaba como Rafael, pero me llevó toda una vida aprender a dibujar como
un niño” (Picasso)
As a Faber & Faber editor, T. S. Eliot turned down George Orwell twice
Coca Cola took the colors of the Peruvian flag in the way it took Peruvian cocaine as an
additive a century ago
“Picasso’s cut / Like a laser into the dark hard of the mystery” (Charles Wright)
Corralled Galapagos tortoises are fed taro leaves, mats of them thrown into the pens
behind the research station buildings in Puerto Ayora
Haunted at seven or eight in WWII, strongly, imagining facing death as a kid in German
occupation, being blasted off my feet running pell-mell to an air raid shelter
Or thinking as a Wehrmacht child soldier cowering under fire
Awareness of the war as present in America as the weather then
Three cattle egrets now, at migration rest here hunched one above the other set one-two-
three in lakeside bushes, standing out like laundry drying
Into the Americas last century storm-driven from West Africa to the Brazilian bulge then
expanding ever northward, still off-and-on scarce here
Late fall when the final maple leaves go yellow here, off behind some remaining ones is
common privet gone feral and the woodlot’s Euonymus, both a dusky cochineal as if
toned with heliotrope in this late afternoon rain-diffused light
As a patch of a Vuillard vineyard, a Bonnard garden just out there through the window
As fine as the allegretto second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh
Its gentle quietude
As living in the wonder of having nature from unmannered trees and shrubs nearby
Habitat
What alienates from huge cities is the balance of Garry Winogrand’s urban angst
Alfred Döblin, Alexanderplatz; Andrey Bely, Petersburg; Joyce’s Ulysses; Dos Passos,
Manhattan Transfer
Greta Thunberg asked of her impressions on arriving in New York off the sailboat said
the city was immense, noisy and that it smells
“subway reeks river reeks / hot city reeks in the dawn” (Deborah Landau)
Green Sweden, fine but so what, the size of a middle suburb of Mumbai
“being a kid was not knowing what to say” (Philip Levine)
Core racism in this country explicit as in Natasha Trethewey’s Mississippi
As ubiquitous as dogs gesture at scratch-covering their feces
With minorities being anything but minor
Why no more satyagraha?
“When we are no longer children we are already dead” (Brancusi)
About the old coat and tie, on which both Pancho Villa and Leon Trotsky agreed, for both
it was their most demeaning compromise to anonymity, Villa incognito for the train to El
Paso in 1916 and Trotsky traveling incognito to St. Petersburg in 1905
As Andrew Yang makes a run for the White House proud as a kid for shunning neckties
“Working at a law firm was like a pie-eating contest, and if you won, your prize was
more pie” (Andrew Yang)
As within Mahler’s Third , its final movement, Langsam, Ruhevoll, Empfunden (slowly, tranquil, sentimental)
“...if you get through a childhood like mine... you have had all the inoculations you need
to keep you on a level keel for the rest of your life. The sad part is most of us don’t”
(James Michener)
And around the halfway point, most reasonable lives abandon renewal and accept
decline, repudiating of vapid self-improvement projects and panaceas
Like those big top-heavy MaxxPro desert-tan armored military trucks pulling out of
northern Syria now in abandonment of the Kurds look like the hollow promises
themselves
Perfidious Columbia
Gem of the ocean
Joaquín Sorolla, a Valenciano, d. 1923, the whole inherency of Impressionism behind and
bolstering him, considered a genre painter, but he had no other place to go until Picasso,
so he barreled ahead in all his exuberance to paint saltwater playas and sunny skin
During Diderot’s winter visit to Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg (analogous to
Akhmatova famously receiving Isaiah Berlin there almost two centuries on), Diderot
advised Catherine about many of the paintings in the Hermitage treasure
“I shall neither change it nor explain it. / ‘What I have written – I have written.’”
(Akhmatova, there in the Leningrad Siege, November, 1944)
Ordinary computers store data in bits, either 1 or 0, quantum computers use qubits that
can be 1 and 0 at the same time, a two-state quantum-mechanical system
“If anything means nothing, nothing means anything” (Charles Wright)
Recounting hallucinating as he lay on a barracks rack there twelve years old and dying as
the Russians liberated Auschwitz at three in the afternoon, January 27, 1945
Still sharp and his Swiss life is of course secure
As deeper we go into this era of shrinking egalitarian ideals
Of trashy Trumpismo hustle of inequities
This bizarre supr-lux time for the indulgent of exclusive privilege in branded chains of
resorts like Amangiri and Amulato
Fully instep is the new aspirational genre of the debut memoir
All that as climate change grows violent
Like the agility of the sharp-shinned hawk that just slipped in, a strange sound, gone flat
level, fast away trailing a couple some house finch feathers floating down
“Peregrines reef their / wings and plunge like weighted insults” (John Lane)
The essence of birds is hard for painters to catch, either they’re drawn objectively as
guidebook realistic, or as stylized symbols
As Cézanne deliberately failed to paint the moon
“for knowledge, add something every day, / To be wise subtract” (Charles Wright)
The Salone de Mesi, in the Schifanoia Palace, Ferrara, Cosimo Tura’s pagan pageantry,
no Christ, no Maria, no crosses, vignettes of the labors of the seasons, with the lambs
being only lambs, counter-Christian dead-center 1400s
The auspices of the Estes
The great brick palace itself built the century before, Schifanoia, meaning something like
escape from boredom, a banquet house for delizie, 1400s diversions
The frescoes painted circa 1469-70 by artisan of the d’Este palace, those vignettes of the
labors of the seasons and the activities of the Ferrarese court as it was under Borso
d’Este’s suzeraintry
The large figures followed, perhaps were traced upon, Cosimo Tura’s cartoons
With few nuances of the politics of the d’Este court
The learned, elaborate scheme of the allegories is subtitle and uneasily mysterious
Of another era
Early renaissance consciousness as distant as any foreign culture’s awarenesses
Two Estes boys of that ancient lineage were at Quaker school, Joe was one’s name, their
family in Princeton away from fascism, both quiet, congenially mysterious
It may have been language
Their presence, features, and helmets of their black hair, faces equal to renaissance Estes
portraits down the Italian centuries
Would watch them without any sense of Cosimo Tura’s grand pagan vision, or of
Ferrara’s immense impact that was soon dimmed into the obscurity of the Ferrarese
margin by Christian militancy
Way out west now coming off Fandango Pass in the Warren Range east off 395 between
Goose Lake and Cedarville
“It dips downhill and I follow it. / It dips down and it disappears and I follow it.”
(Charles Wright)
Most observations and facts within history lost except in individuals’ fragile and temporal
memories
Retrovida: A Buenos Aires dinner with effusive porteños in a glass-faced upscale
Belgrano parrilla finishing with limoncello and a stop at a park’s tango gazebo
A dozen or more porteños there with a boom box – un radiocasete
Amiably engaged urbanites changing partners song to song
An urbanized world now
And ninety-one percent of people worldwide live now where air pollution levels exceed
the WHO’s recommended limits
The most invasive acqua alta in half a century in Venice yesterday
“Toward world’s end, through the bare / beginnings of winter, they are traveling again.”
(Louise Glück, “The Magi”)
Thank you, whoever shanked the quilted USB cable from my new Velocifire made in
China keyboard and wrapped it with single-sided velcro tape
Setting me up for the instruction booklet’s “Service Life: >50 million key strokes”
Whoever shanked that cable works for Velocifire somewhere off in China’s churning vast
And is ancestral kin to, not quite a compatriot of, but ancestral kin to the Hongkongers
mostly in their teens and twenties who gear up with their scooter helmets, full breather or
gauze masks, maybe goggles, some dressed tout noir, with light backpacks of “first aid
stuff,” as one said to a BBC interviewer
Social unrest entering its sixth month that shows no sign of abating
In the clash of something against something else
Como un Niño
Soviet bicycles often lacked tubes with valve cores so kids would pump up hard, take the
pump hose off fast and jam a bar of soap on the valve stem to hold the air as they screwed
a cap on
“Desde niño pintaba como Rafael, pero me llevó toda una vida aprender a dibujar como
un niño” (Picasso)
As a Faber & Faber editor, T. S. Eliot turned down George Orwell twice
Coca Cola took the colors of the Peruvian flag in the way it took Peruvian cocaine as an
additive a century ago
“Picasso’s cut / Like a laser into the dark hard of the mystery” (Charles Wright)
Corralled Galapagos tortoises are fed taro leaves, mats of them thrown into the pens
behind the research station buildings in Puerto Ayora
Haunted at seven or eight in WWII, strongly, imagining facing death as a kid in German
occupation, being blasted off my feet running pell-mell to an air raid shelter
Or thinking as a Wehrmacht child soldier cowering under fire
Awareness of the war as present in America as the weather then
Three cattle egrets now, at migration rest here hunched one above the other set one-two-
three in lakeside bushes, standing out like laundry drying
Into the Americas last century storm-driven from West Africa to the Brazilian bulge then
expanding ever northward, still off-and-on scarce here
Late fall when the final maple leaves go yellow here, off behind some remaining ones is
common privet gone feral and the woodlot’s Euonymus, both a dusky cochineal as if
toned with heliotrope in this late afternoon rain-diffused light
As a patch of a Vuillard vineyard, a Bonnard garden just out there through the window
As fine as the allegretto second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh
Its gentle quietude
As living in the wonder of having nature from unmannered trees and shrubs nearby
Habitat
What alienates from huge cities is the balance of Garry Winogrand’s urban angst
Alfred Döblin, Alexanderplatz; Andrey Bely, Petersburg; Joyce’s Ulysses; Dos Passos,
Manhattan Transfer
Greta Thunberg asked of her impressions on arriving in New York off the sailboat said
the city was immense, noisy and that it smells
“subway reeks river reeks / hot city reeks in the dawn” (Deborah Landau)
Green Sweden, fine but so what, the size of a middle suburb of Mumbai
“being a kid was not knowing what to say” (Philip Levine)
Core racism in this country explicit as in Natasha Trethewey’s Mississippi
As ubiquitous as dogs gesture at scratch-covering their feces
With minorities being anything but minor
Why no more satyagraha?
“When we are no longer children we are already dead” (Brancusi)
About the old coat and tie, on which both Pancho Villa and Leon Trotsky agreed, for both
it was their most demeaning compromise to anonymity, Villa incognito for the train to El
Paso in 1916 and Trotsky traveling incognito to St. Petersburg in 1905
As Andrew Yang makes a run for the White House proud as a kid for shunning neckties
“Working at a law firm was like a pie-eating contest, and if you won, your prize was
more pie” (Andrew Yang)
As within Mahler’s Third , its final movement, Langsam, Ruhevoll, Empfunden (slowly, tranquil, sentimental)
“...if you get through a childhood like mine... you have had all the inoculations you need
to keep you on a level keel for the rest of your life. The sad part is most of us don’t”
(James Michener)
And around the halfway point, most reasonable lives abandon renewal and accept
decline, repudiating of vapid self-improvement projects and panaceas
Like those big top-heavy MaxxPro desert-tan armored military trucks pulling out of
northern Syria now in abandonment of the Kurds look like the hollow promises
themselves
Perfidious Columbia
Gem of the ocean
Joaquín Sorolla, a Valenciano, d. 1923, the whole inherency of Impressionism behind and
bolstering him, considered a genre painter, but he had no other place to go until Picasso,
so he barreled ahead in all his exuberance to paint saltwater playas and sunny skin
During Diderot’s winter visit to Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg (analogous to
Akhmatova famously receiving Isaiah Berlin there almost two centuries on), Diderot
advised Catherine about many of the paintings in the Hermitage treasure
“I shall neither change it nor explain it. / ‘What I have written – I have written.’”
(Akhmatova, there in the Leningrad Siege, November, 1944)
Ordinary computers store data in bits, either 1 or 0, quantum computers use qubits that
can be 1 and 0 at the same time, a two-state quantum-mechanical system
“If anything means nothing, nothing means anything” (Charles Wright)
Recounting hallucinating as he lay on a barracks rack there twelve years old and dying as
the Russians liberated Auschwitz at three in the afternoon, January 27, 1945
Still sharp and his Swiss life is of course secure
As deeper we go into this era of shrinking egalitarian ideals
Of trashy Trumpismo hustle of inequities
This bizarre supr-lux time for the indulgent of exclusive privilege in branded chains of
resorts like Amangiri and Amulato
Fully instep is the new aspirational genre of the debut memoir
All that as climate change grows violent
Like the agility of the sharp-shinned hawk that just slipped in, a strange sound, gone flat
level, fast away trailing a couple some house finch feathers floating down
“Peregrines reef their / wings and plunge like weighted insults” (John Lane)
The essence of birds is hard for painters to catch, either they’re drawn objectively as
guidebook realistic, or as stylized symbols
As Cézanne deliberately failed to paint the moon
“for knowledge, add something every day, / To be wise subtract” (Charles Wright)
The Salone de Mesi, in the Schifanoia Palace, Ferrara, Cosimo Tura’s pagan pageantry,
no Christ, no Maria, no crosses, vignettes of the labors of the seasons, with the lambs
being only lambs, counter-Christian dead-center 1400s
The auspices of the Estes
The great brick palace itself built the century before, Schifanoia, meaning something like
escape from boredom, a banquet house for delizie, 1400s diversions
The frescoes painted circa 1469-70 by artisan of the d’Este palace, those vignettes of the
labors of the seasons and the activities of the Ferrarese court as it was under Borso
d’Este’s suzeraintry
The large figures followed, perhaps were traced upon, Cosimo Tura’s cartoons
With few nuances of the politics of the d’Este court
The learned, elaborate scheme of the allegories is subtitle and uneasily mysterious
Of another era
Early renaissance consciousness as distant as any foreign culture’s awarenesses
Two Estes boys of that ancient lineage were at Quaker school, Joe was one’s name, their
family in Princeton away from fascism, both quiet, congenially mysterious
It may have been language
Their presence, features, and helmets of their black hair, faces equal to renaissance Estes
portraits down the Italian centuries
Would watch them without any sense of Cosimo Tura’s grand pagan vision, or of
Ferrara’s immense impact that was soon dimmed into the obscurity of the Ferrarese
margin by Christian militancy
Way out west now coming off Fandango Pass in the Warren Range east off 395 between
Goose Lake and Cedarville
“It dips downhill and I follow it. / It dips down and it disappears and I follow it.”
(Charles Wright)
Most observations and facts within history lost except in individuals’ fragile and temporal
memories
Retrovida: A Buenos Aires dinner with effusive porteños in a glass-faced upscale
Belgrano parrilla finishing with limoncello and a stop at a park’s tango gazebo
A dozen or more porteños there with a boom box – un radiocasete
Amiably engaged urbanites changing partners song to song
An urbanized world now
And ninety-one percent of people worldwide live now where air pollution levels exceed
the WHO’s recommended limits
The most invasive acqua alta in half a century in Venice yesterday
“Toward world’s end, through the bare / beginnings of winter, they are traveling again.”
(Louise Glück, “The Magi”)
Thank you, whoever shanked the quilted USB cable from my new Velocifire made in
China keyboard and wrapped it with single-sided velcro tape
Setting me up for the instruction booklet’s “Service Life: >50 million key strokes”
Whoever shanked that cable works for Velocifire somewhere off in China’s churning vast
And is ancestral kin to, not quite a compatriot of, but ancestral kin to the Hongkongers
mostly in their teens and twenties who gear up with their scooter helmets, full breather or
gauze masks, maybe goggles, some dressed tout noir, with light backpacks of “first aid
stuff,” as one said to a BBC interviewer
Social unrest entering its sixth month that shows no sign of abating
In the clash of something against something else
Copyright © February 2021 D.E. Steward
D. E. Steward’s five volumes of Chroma were out last year from
Archae Editions in Brooklyn. Chroma is a month-to-month calendar
book begun in September 1986, Volume Five concludes with August 2016.
The months are continuing.
Archae Editions in Brooklyn. Chroma is a month-to-month calendar
book begun in September 1986, Volume Five concludes with August 2016.
The months are continuing.
