A waistcoat, embroidered in an almost Japanese style with straight, vertical wands of forsythia on french blue silk. The new Mountain Goats album, Tallahassee. An abandoned dovecote in the Touraine, furnished only with sixteenth-century tapestries and a single Le Corbusier steel-and-leather bench. Three preserved pears filled with mixed-berry sorbet, garnished with a curly purple basil leaf. The voice of Nico with an acoustic guitar and strings playing Eb-maj13 chords. White cashmere socks, hot from the dryer. A tiny silver letter-opener with an amethyst handle. Violet-flavored chocolates marked with Charlemagne's seal. Purple anemones in a dark-green glass vase. Various wood boxes, shiny, smooth, inlaid with brass or mother-of-pearl, with secret drawers in some of them; they have locks with tiny brass keys. Pearl grey rice paper. 16mo volumes of poetry in marbled bindings, full of dead people's valentines. Cases specific to particular antique drafting instruments; the instruments themselves. Organic Assam with hot milk in a cracked china cup. A perfect lawn at eight-thirty on a Wednesday morning, mist rising up and a stone nymph pouring out water into a pool. Antlers. Handmade flowerpots. The first movement of Joseph Haydn's last piano sonata. The glossy leaves of the orange tree. Insect sounds at midnight. Crisp linens, an open window, croissants with raspberry jam. Names written on dirty windows. Sensible oak tables, white-painted kitchen cupboards with glass doors. Piles of paperbacks on the stair landings. Scale models of buildings. Byzantine ivories from the age of Justinian. A brown wool coat. In the Aeroplane over the Sea on the front porch of a shingle-style house on Cape Cod as the sun goes down. Adirondack chairs. Campgrounds and fairgrounds out of season. Other people's wedding parties glimpsed through car windows. Sargent portraits by moonlight. An antique stele: Athene mourning at a young man's tomb: a plaster cast of this. An Italian bronze satyr, grimacing and twisting for four hundred years. Locks of hair in pinkish gold. Meterological maps. Sheer curtains shot with gold thread; wind. Unlighted back staircases. Cigarettes alone in summertime. The noise a distant highway makes. Blue and white napkins.
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[There will be a party on 12 October at my house just north of B*st*n in *rl*ngt*n. Email me (vide infra) for details if you would like to be there and have not yet received an invitation.]