Corn/Maize

Yesterday at the farm, we pulled the plastic out from around the roots of the strawberries, we made a pot of lavender-rosemary tea (from the herbs) and exchanged our news: Mika's wife is being transferred to Paris and he graduates in a month; Nasser went to China last week...and then we husked corn, pulling the wrapping and corn silk off to expose the red-gold cobs--is it Indian corn? no one seemed to know--soon it will be time to rub the kernels off the cobs. I think this is where I came in, a year ago. Next week there'll be a pizza party, outside, firing up the pizza oven.

And all night I dreamt of husking corn.

Still translating Baudelaire. This morning I revised "La servante au grand coeur," which is #C/100 in the Fleurs du Mal. I think about the poets who were satisfied to publish less and better: Larkin, Bishop, Baudelaire. I have moved gradually away from aspiring to originality to a modest faithfulness. I've consulted some translations that veer from the originals, whether because they wanted to keep the rhymes or because they wanted poems that would be their own poems and have come to respect literalness more. Robert Lowell is the exception, for me, that proves the rule.