The higher, the farther, the faster you fly

[sovay]

Today the streets were full of flowering trees, weeping cherries and saucer magnolias and Bradford pears which blossom like a cloud of white cut paper and smell like week-old fish; I walked circuitously into Union Square and back, reading Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal: The Last of the Innocent (2011) at Hub Comics and acquiring Geoffrey Hill's Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom: Poems 1952–1971 (1975) from the Somerville Public Library, and I forgot my camera, so I have no pictures of white and pink and green blossoms or the afternoon sun making a desert rose of the bricks of the Litchfield Block or the roof of Pearl Street Studios as seen from the overpass, lacking only pigeons and a clothesline to make a modern painting. I met my parents and spatch for dinner at Christopher's. We walked home together down Somerville Ave. as the sky darkened to the deep, luminous blue that is the intensity of wine in hexameters about the sea, a nearly full moon clearing out of the haze. In the evening I read some Hill and watched a small, fine noir that I hope to write about since it was exactly what I was looking for when I tried my luck (and lost) with Out of the Fog (1941). Tomorrow I have plans to attend the Boston Conservatory's production of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock (1937), whose opening night story is legendary; I heard it from my grandfather as well as Tim Robbins. Immediately tonight I suspect I should stop making notes and sleep.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Bradford pears which blossom like a cloud of white cut paper and smell like week-old fish

The lilacs are beginning to come into flower in my neighborhood, each with its enveloping, slightly aquatic sweetness -- all except the shrub down the block, which I always think of as "the carrion lilac."

[sovay]

The lilacs are beginning to come into flower in my neighborhood, each with its enveloping, slightly aquatic sweetness -- all except the shrub down the block, which I always think of as "the carrion lilac."

That's a wonderful image, if possibly not the best neighbor. Is it a different strain?