Roto

Pawnee is almond, Zuñi brown, auburn

Space related ritual drumming

Early autumn Comanche moon across Chihuahua, the Big Bend, western Coahuila

Drums coming in from various directions stacking to a musical depth of field

Beats as rhythm and interference phenomenon resonating in double, triple, and
quadruple Mexican flutes

"I am with you... stood where you stand now"
Sienna brown or teak, deeper than auburn, redder than chestnut brown

Coppo di Marcovaldo, Cimabue, Guido da Siena, Pietro Cavallini, Duccio,
Giotto, Simone Martini

The dark-sky paradox is that with the near-infinity of background stars there
is any night sky black at all

Chavez used random musical themes from different western Mexican cultures but
had no contact with them

The opposite of Elgar's desperate voyage to Manaus

True wonder wherever music takes over daily life

Her most characteristic mannerism, touching her hair fast off one shoulder and
then the other

Unsure, boy-toy self-absorbed

All the corazón in the world but she just can't answer the bell

Sense that there are no other foreigners here now

Siennese drab, light grayish brown duller than sandstone, paler than wood
rose, mysterious and profound

Pietro Lorenzetti and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Maso di Banco, Taddeo Gaddi,
Bernardo Daddi, Andrea Orcagna, Barna da Siena, Francisco Traini, Andrea da
Firenze, Angolo Gaddi

The Quattrocento

Gentile da Fabriano, Pisanello, Masolino, Masaccio, Uccello, Piero della
Francesca, Andrea del Castagno, Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo

Four of the five vowels lie clustered in the family name Pollaiuolo

Antique gold is redder, stronger, lighter than buckthorn brown

Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Fra Filippo Lippi, Francesco Pesellino,
Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi, Filippo's son, Perugino

An historical precipice lofting out from Perugia's grand piazza off across
twenty-seven centuries to the Etruscan city states, a lookout's view down the
Tiber Valley from the Giardini

Continuities thrust up from the ancient world, real as woodland mushrooms up
from the brown dead duff fallen leaves

Signorelli, Piero di Cosimo

In the family of browns, bobolink is virtually the same as deer

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Mantegna, Gentile Bellini, Giovanni Bellini,
Antonello da Messina, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese,
Correggio

Lucumonies

Medieval Ravenna, six kilometers from the Adriatic now, was for a time flooded
so that like Venice up the coast its streets became canals

Allemagne, Alamanni, simply from Alle Männer

Ego, self-esteem, self-esteem, ego

The German to whom the widowed Lithuanian mother of nine let one of their two
Lower Eastside tenement rooms would push strips of fat from his coldcuts off
the table to the kids with his bone-handled knife

That knife as sinister and threatening to those nine kids as a .38 special or
a machine pistol on the table is to many kids now

At ten the oldest hustled some money, bought coldcuts, bread, cheese, made
sandwiches, rode the Albany train, sold out, bought more makings, sold out
coming back down the Hudson. Moved operations to Buffalo because it's half-
way to Chicago, was rich at eleven and called it the Union News Company

When the extended family came from everywhere for three days met at the
Neville, two found they'd talked in code to each other night after bombing-
Damascus-night on ground-to-air radio during Israel's independence war, pilot
to ground control

Arabian brown is redder and darker than oak, and darker than Vassar tan

There are a billion Moslems now, a hundred and fifty million are Shiites

In this country, fifteen million Southern Baptists, a million Orthodox Jews

Leaving Southampton Water at dusk, off the South Downs at dawn, Outer Gabbard
in midafternoon, then cross to the Dutch coast in overnight fog picking along
through the light buoy greens and whites

The Outer Gabbard Lightship's red-hull came up nasturtium that afternoon on
the javelle swells and sky

A stormy purple dawn with a black line squall astern mainsail perilously
unreefed headsail set in sheeting rain with the sand coast invisible abeam

Locating ourselves in an idiom and a diction

Claude Simone, Peter Handke, Edward Abbey, Michel Tournier

Specific to our own habitats

The radar blips that North Sea night materialized as prodigious merchantmen
throbbing close on near-intersect course dark steel above our fiberglass and sails

Thirty or forty tons out of thick fog at fifteen knots holds to an absolute
course, your responsibility to read it, is death to cross

"I suppose this is as much as I know"

This stupendous world of oceans and crenulate coasts, to consider their reach
and approach lifts to a near infinity of place

Ten thousand years of human history, eons of scant literacy

Most of the past was large-print because of a dearth of reading glasses

Flying home to Shanghai, for months her family hid from her that her father
was gravely ill and she learned only from a slip of the pen in a letter from a
friend last week

Uneasy, even tremulous, afraid she will be unable to leave China again

Ab ovo, abridged edition, abstract, academy

He flew out to Santa Rosa for his brother-in-law's funeral at which they stood
around eating, watching family videos and looking at wedding albums and
photographs. No casket, no prayers, the body was left to science

Bistec de Palomilla. Fielete de puerco frito. Puerco asado. Pisto manchego.
Costillas empanizadas. Costillas fritas. Ropa Vieja. Picadillo

Boliche, mollete, Materva, plátanos, yuca, tostones, tamale, moros

Natilla, flan

"He went through the house opening all the rooms, letting the light from
different directions fuse"

Tobey painted on styrofoam boards in 1968-70 and the bubble edges exactly
delineate his line. The thickness of the boards is important to the effect
and he left most of them unstripped, scored a few with knife lines like
sloppily done rubber tree or lontar palm tapping cuts

"In Paris one can usually see the sky without raising one's eyes; even when
looking straight ahead one sees it at the end of many streets"

Probably impossible to write like Handke without living in a big city to walk
it frequently

Truculent, unyielding, blunt

"His organism had stopped doing anything but rejecting; once he had eliminated
all simulated feelings, there was nothing left of his self, nothing, that is,
except the dead weight of an unreality at odds with the whole world"

In a word, arrogant. Coyote in the sheepfold, shark inside the reef, in a
less tolerant place than this someone would face him down or he would be
shunned or taken outside in the cold and abandoned

heir
cosmic ray survey expeditions

Her first trip, the length of the Volga south to Astrakhan

Her trip the summer she was seventeen, the length of the Lena. From Ust-Kut,
500 kilometers north of Irtkutsk, it took many weeks to Yakutsk, then only
fourteen days to reach the delta and the Laptev Sea

She spent one summer entirely on Kamchatka. The next summer traveling down
Russia's longest river, the Yenisey, from Krasnoyarsk to Dudinka. Dudinka is
the first port above the Kara Sea

Creaky quarter-speed train on a roadbed laid on permafrost from Dudinka to
Norilsk. Norilsk the northernmost town in Russia, founded in 1935, built with
forced labor

The Gulag

Rustic brown, yellower and not as strong as roan, yellower and paler than
mahogany, and yellower, weaker, lighter than oxblood, also called casserole,
gingerspice and Eskimo

Another summer they took three months to travel on an icebreaker through a
hundred degrees of high boreal longitude Arctic Ocean, Vladivostok to Murmunsk

He lays out his remaining money, his apples, carrots, bread, sliced ham,
wooden matches, on the dog food bags after going through the checkout. He
organizes, trims, repacks for a half an hour. Drops a dime, spends ten
minutes looking for it. Finally gets it all in plastic wrap and small
paperbags, stows them in his pack, heads off across the parking lot

Danish Jante Loven. Never think you are better than anybody else and stay
away from anything different, especially if you are female

Another call today from Ethiopia. A decision will be made this week about
evacuation in the face of the rebel attack on the capital

He bemoans the impending loss of the antiques he brought to Addis late last
year and the new Toyota Landcruiser he took delivery on last week

African brown is slightly redder, lighter, and stronger than chocolate brown

Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Houphouët-Boigny, Nyerere, the old school, none of whom
would have let Ethiopia come to this, this Marxist vs. Marxist civil war

Sudan is a dark grayish yellow to light olive brown. Sudan brown is redder
than oak and yellower and darker than Vassar tan

As Mozart thought of Africa

Fragments are generative and one fragment begets another, assists, delays or
interrupts

Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens

This extraordinarily chromatic peak in Western music, Mozart's tragic A Minor
Rondo, K. 511. He had just lost his father

"Let's see where this great world will end, how far the soul will stretch"

Swans as swans have existed for twenty-five million years