Part three of Corfe written by Robin Blaser

continued

III

Corfe

God keep the Hollow Land from all wrong !

God keep the Hollow Land going strong!

A song a boy made in a girl

Brother and sister in a car

Over the flint, upon the turf

Beside the crook-backed angry thorn

Under the gulls, above the dead

To where the light made the grass glass.

Until they came to the world's end

The sea below and under them

The gulls above and over them

And through the thunder and the wailing

Sun full of wings was over them

In a glass world made out of grass.

'God keep the Hollow Land from all wrong !

God keep the Hollow Land going strong !

Curl horns and fleeces, straighten trees,

Multiply lobsters, assemble bees.

Give it to us for ever, take our hints

Knot up its roads for us, sharpen its flints,

Pour the wind into it, the thick sea rain,

Blot out the landscape and destroy the train.

Turn back our folk from it, we hate the lot

Turn the American and turn the Scot ;

Take unpropitious the turf, the dust

If the sea doesn't get'em then the cattle must.

Make many slugs where the stranger goes

Better than barbed wire the briar rose ;

Swarm on the down-tops the flint mens' hosts

Taboo the barrows, encourage ghosts.

Arm the rabbits with tigers' teeth

Serpents shoot from the soil beneath

By pain in belly and foot and mouth

Keep them out of our sacred south.'

Robin Blaser

Vancouver,B.C.

August, 1978

from Imanginary Letters by

Mary Butts

Salted Caramel Brownies

continued

II

Corfe

And the hazel thicket

And the red blackberry thorn.

Never trust a hemlock

An inch above your mouth.

An ice-green hemlock

Is a lover

In the wood.

Now every way the wind blows

this sweetie goes

In the south

Where goes the leaf of the rose

And the evergreen tree.

Inside the house, above the wood

Look out of the tall windows squared

With wood-strips painted white.

The wild hill runs up the wild sky

The wild sky runs over itself

And goes nowhere.

A man crosses the rough grass

Up the wild hill ;

Strong graceless kharki legs in silhouette

Tire and tough, treading the hill down.

He will not wear it down

Let him try !

He is here only because this place is

A button on the bodies of the green hills.

written by Robin Blaser

Vancouver, B. C.

August, 1978

from the Imaginary Letters of

Mary Butts

Ina Garten's recipe.

1/2 lb unsalted butter

8 ounces plus 6 ounces Hershey's semisweet chocolate chips

3 ounces unsweetened chocolate

3 extra large eggs

1 1/2 tablespoons instant coffee granules, such as Nescafe

1 tablespoon pur vanilla extract

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour, divided

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

5 to 6 ounces good caramel sauce, such as Fran's

2 to 3 teaspoons flaked sea salt, such as Maldon

this really is the best brownies ever! all the others I've only made out of a box, and tried them all.

Home made whipped topping and ice cream. I had both!

Happy Birth Day

Birth Day Tiramisu

Corfe

I

Corfe, the hub of a wheel

Where the green down-spokes turning

Embrace an earth-cup of smoke and ghosts and stone.

The sea orchestrates

The still dance in the cup

Danced for ever, the same intricate sobriety

Equivocal, adored.

But when I remember you Corfe, I remember Delphi

Because your history also is a mystery of God.

'And God is no blind man and God is ou Father:

But like lovers

Your cup is full of the courts of other princes

Disputing you.

Very sweet is the Sacred Wood

In the gold clearing, in the mustard patch;

But at night comes a change

Like a gold ball thrown out

And a black ball thrown in

(Not sunset behind Tyneham Cap

On a night without a moon.)

But a shift of potencies

Like a black ball thrown in

And a gold ball thrown out

And the players are princes

Of the turf and the weed

And the wind-moulded trees

part one written by Robin Blaser

Vancouver, B.C. 

August, 1978

 Imaginary Letters by Mary Butts

Birth Day Tiramisu

recipe from Ina Garten

August 29 2015

Saturday

Baked Salmon

Asian noodle and Lemon pound cake with Blueberry sauce.

Funeral Rites

I

I shouldered a kind of manhood

stepping in to lift the coffins

of dead relations.

They had been laid out

in tainted rooms,

their eyelids glistening,

their dough-white hands

shackled in rosary beads.

The puffed knuckles

had unwrinkled, the nails

were darkened, the wrists

obediently sloped.

The dulse-brown shroud,

the quilted satin cribs:

I knelt courteously

admiring it all

as wax melted down and veined the candles,

the flames hovering

to the women hovering behind me.

And always, in a corner,

the coffin lid,

 its nail-heads dressed

with little gleaming crosses.

Dear soapstone masks,

kissing their igloo brows

had to suffice

before the nails were sunk

and the black glacier

of ear funeral

pushed away.

II

Now as news comes in of each neighbourly murder

we pine for ceremony,

customary rhythms:

the temperate footsteps

of a cortege, winding past

each blinded home.

I would restore

the great chambers of Boyne,

prepare a sepulcher

under the cupmarked stones.

Out of side-street and bye-roads

purring family cars

nose into line,

the whole country tuens

to the muffled drumming

of ten thousand engines.

Somnambulant wormen,

left behind, move

through emptied kitchesn

imagining our slow triumph

towards the mounds.

Quiet as a serpent

in its grassy boulevard

the procession drags its tail

out of the Gap of the North

as its head already enters

the megalithic doorway.

III

When they have put the stone back in tis mouth

we will drive north again

past Strang and Carling fjords

the cud o memory

allayed for once, arbitration

of the feud placated,

imagining those under the hill

disposed like Gunnar

who lay beautiful

inside his burial mound,

though dead by violence

and unavenged.

Men said that he was chanting

verses about honour

and that four lights burned

in corners of the chamber:

which opened then, as he turned

with a joyful face

to look at the moon.

Seamus Heaney

poems

1965-1975

Struesel Sour cream Coffee Cake

Magic has not yet been properly defined. In its practice it is, of course, very largely primitive science, misunderstandings by false analogy of the way things work, of natural law.  But behind that there seems to remain a very peculiar kind of awareness, an awareness modified and sometimes lost by people whoes life has been passed in towns.  It is most difficult to describe.  It has something to do with a sense of the invisible, the non-exisistent in a scientific sense, relations between things of a different order:  the moon and a stone, the sea and a piece of wood, women and fish.

Traps for Unbelievers, (1932)

Imaginary Letters by Mary Butts

(1890 - 1937)

Recipe from Ina Garten