Studies in words

Sunny windy Sunday. Listening mostly these days to JSP bluegrass collections and Gary Higgins’ Red Hash; finished Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, readable & well-written; “Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals/As when from flowry meads th’hills shadow steales”—“beauteous” being the only word of seventeen which is doing no work; a summer romp with Marlowe perhaps; planting fuchsias in the front, cat on the side, in the sun; clothes, deaths, jobs, mirrors, trips, honestly, no real jolts or inspirations, just re-reading and re-listening, and re-seeing, so much, singly, yet minute and matter; “melancholy space and doleful time” (Wordsworth).