Please come flying

It has been twelve days since I wrote. I was away for exactly a week, and it has taken me this long to settle down to routine again.

Since returning have read a couple of books (prose!) , the one worth mentioning here is Nigel Cox's Phone Home Berlin, a collection of essays with some poetry thrown in. The core of the writing is about his experiences in helping set up the Jewish Museum in Berlin. I was very interested in the interaction between the Kiwis and the Germans, and found some of what I expected, and other things that were more surprising and helpful in their clarity - for instance the value that is placed upon art and beauty in Germany (read Europe) versus NZ. When he got back, I think that NC found it hard being here... An impressive person, in his ability to deal with people and in the knowledge and skill he acquired despite his lack of formal education.

Am busy with Elizabeth Bishop - her poem 'Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore' is in my mind - the repeated call Please come flying. The pleading quality to that sentence comes in part from the contrast with the rest of the poem. Now I've read that poem twice and thought about it, and after a few days all that remains is the Please come flying and an image of a lady in black - hat, cape and shoes, flying up a NY street. Here EB has found someone she can trust who will come when she calls. The bits of biography I read, where she said that at her grandparents house, her status was on a par with the dog's - she was not yet ten years old. That cry Please come flying seems to come from a child, must date from that time, the aching loss of her mother.

Have written a poem about the little study, for the 'collection' about the house. (I don't like the word 'collection'). Actually not a poem yet. A poem aan het worden, 'in the becoming'. Incipient I think is the word.

Am making a list of 'projects'. Maybe commitments is a better word here. Reminds me what it is about.