That summer in the last-minute rented cottage both doors and every window’s screen, it seemed, had a patch. Some had tiny bits of fabric, white flags of surrender stuck in the space made by who knows who, or what. The Maine mosquitoes were enormous, as were the flies. June, the most sumptuous month of the year, here, this June of my life. Everything wrong (at home), and everything in sight was right, the unsurprising unswimmably cold ocean, an inlet really. Alone. No phone, pre-phone, no light, all reading and writing by flash, or by on-again off-again power which sometimes worked and sometimes did not (like life.)
is more beautiful than money. Patience is more beautiful than achievement. Green is more beautiful than its absence on a branch or the spine of a tree. Red is more beautiful with the sun bending and stretching right on it, more beautiful peeling, or about to peel, where red has come to rest on the west side of a clap- board Cape, in Maine, or New Hampshire. And if enough time has passed, this particular red might be more beautiful in proximity to a body of salt water marsh or a fresh water lake that resides near a lightly trafficked road alongside a woodland of scrub pines or spruces or fir, and not so remote that none could see it, but right there so that anyone could place their face their hands right up close, so they could, but wouldn’t need to touch it, to feel it, or see it like this through paned glass adjacent to it. Look. What could be more beautiful than this –– time + patience, with just enough light + color, combined.
I can’t stop hearing and touching its splintering and yawning its mothering its calling its bang and air moving through its face its trim never quite lining up its wood its warp its hook and eye its new hampshire its beach and flies caught in it its passage its call back its self-slamming shut its banging and banging and its spring its longing to be pressed its screws coming loose its green paint peeling summer cottage hush its winters in the basement its basement its coming up for air its robert frost its wallace stevens its william carlos williams its weeping its mind never satisfied its roads diverging in a wood its spine its sunshine of late afternoon its doing what it says it is going to do the way it paints its own way its draw its draft its closing and not closing its back door its back to everything overgrown grass on the other side of its wrist its small knob its metal its morning its very early morning it’s always very early morning
As it is happening, as the dog you adore is alive in his chew, snout in the air, as the oyster is alive in your sea sour mouth as the sail is gusted wide open, full, the spit of a wave is alive on your face, this white cap of a sunset as it is, hours away, as is the fade of the buzz of the grass cutter, light, not coming back, the breakwater is still granite is still weight bearing, your mother is still alive in what you trod on, can’t slip over, you, awake, in the comb of, the twist of, the bread of, the lash on the lid of this this this.
Elaine Sexton’s fifth collection of poetry, Site Specific: New & Selected, will be published by Grid Books in 2025. Her poems, reviews, essays and works in visual art have appeared in numerous journals and sites in the US and abroad, including the American Poetry Review, Art in America, Plume, Poetry, andwildness. She lives in eastern Long Island and New York, and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute.
This early photography book, titled Specimens of Fancy Turning, features thirty tipped-in albumen silver prints of geometric designs created on “the hand or foot lathe”. Resembling something between spirograph drawings and textbook diagrams of orbiting electrons, the figures were created using geometric, oval, and eccentric chucks and an elliptical cutting frame. Attributed to “an amateur” on its title page, the book is the work of Edward J. Woolsey (1803–1872), an heir of the mercantile Woolsey family and partner in the New York Patent Sugar Refinery. From Public Domain Review.
