Transcription of Manuscript 9
This transcription may be read with the image of the manuscripts opened in a separate browser window. Since it will be apparent from the images, no attempt is made to make the transcription correspond exactly to the spacing of the manuscripts.
Words that seem indecipherable are indicated by [word] or [words]. A conjectural reading of a word is indicated by, for example: swan[?]. This transcription should be considered a rough draft. Many words that seem indecipherable to one reader will be clear to another. Pease suggest your own corrections to Timothy Materer.
Note near Top
Monday
Jerl
D's book in
Public Library
Titles for A Scattering of Salts
Novelette 3
Cosmo
Upward Look
Four Columns in Left Margin, Left to Right
The young minotaur
Leans Sits in evening glow
Against the portico
By which we enter the maze
He has taken off
monstrous
The terrible bull-head of the bull
His eyes [word] & glaze
Sun turned his black locks red
turn[?] blood
He's calm & [words] for blood[?]
As a drawing by
Cocteau
selfless
His robe parts to show
the flank
The thigh like noble cactus
small limb
Dense with soft black gold spines
Curled [word]
[word] weapons incapable
of doing harm.
looks at us
tenderly
We have come from Athens
As tribute their This year's tribute — to
Crete
Elderly women grandmothers & women
For him to For him
He means to devour
All that we've
felt & seen
In our/ long lives,
All that we know; All that we've seen & said
meat
And Mind's heart & heart's blood —
Take me, I pray
— one by one we
advance
like figures in a
frieze
But then
He rises, says come in
Bottom Half
his robe has opened to expose the thigh
the hard
Soft ciliate spines of a [word] cactus hydrant
Sits in the sunny portal of the thick
dreaming maze
It is to him,
each spring,
The young minotaur to whom
Ten elders, men & women, are sent each year
As tribute. He is beautiful as a
Cretean drawing;
A beast? Does he really mean to devour them.
He looks at them so lovingly. He wants
not them
To eat what they know, what they've
felt & seen
In the course of their long lives.
But there is no way.
He <still> lives in a world before the stoa
The give & take of master & pupil.
A few more years & he will ask the
[word] last[?] poet
[words]
If he was thinking of Donne when he
wrote that line —
↑
Sept 22
middle of night