A Faithful Account of Where I Live: The Letters of Cid Corman and William Bronk

10 November 69

Dear Cid

Even the Chrysanthemums and asters are gone but there is some green grass here and there and a dandelion sometimes half-opened in the mud. A spell of wet cheerless bleak days. And then the sun comes out sideways, as it were, not to intrude, as though it had been dead drunk for two weeks maybe. The whole world is soft and gentle and stained with absorbed intensities of color the other seasons don't dare. I dig the corms and tubes out of the garden and set them in the cellar for the winter and smell the cellar smells-the fuel oil and the mouse I poisoned. I run the lawn mower to chop the soggy leaves on the lawn. Half the storm sash have been washed and set in place. The awning is down from the porch and the porch furniture put away. The roof repair man has had his ladders by the barn for a week or more waiting for a decent day to replace slates on the roof. Morning and afternoons are dark and we wonder at the way we slide into the green season hardly minding it at all and knowing it is more terrible than that and that we ought to mind it more.

I write to my friend Cid a long horizontal away and feel like the prodigal sun shuffling my feet a little asking to be taken in again.

Our little communications are strange. The lot beyond the fence is overgrown with brush and woods and I took my heavy lawn mower this summer and cut a maze of paths and clearings there. After a few weeks the children on the next street found it and I could hear them running and calling in high excitement. I felt like the men in the South who sit listening to the voices of their hounds chasing foxes. The children found the note I left them and didn't care it was mine or know I heard them read it.

Wordless messages

Bill