Maggie's Farm

Two in the Campagna

I wonder how you feel to-day
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?

For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalized me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.

Help me to hold it! First it left
The yellow fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft,
Some old tomb’s ruin: yonder weed
Took up the floating weft,

Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles, -blind and green they grope
Among the honey meal: and last,
Everywhere on the grassy slope
O traced it. Hold it fast!

The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air-
Rome’s ghost since her decease.

Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers!

How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?
I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more.
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? What the core
O’ the wound, since wound must be?

I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul’s springs, - your part my part
In life, for good and ill.

No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth, - I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak-
Then the good minute goes.

Already how am I so far
Our of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The Old trick! Only I discern-
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

Here's proof: I, the world-famous Founder and Editor of this here popular knuckledragger website, am not on the speaker list for the November post-midterm cruise.

I double-checked, just to make sure my picture wasn't there. Nope, wasn't there.

Oh well, no matter. That's poachin' season anyway, so I'll be busy.

If by any chance I decide to show up on my own nickel at the last moment, say hello. I'll be the big fellow in the camo with the plastic turkey superglued to my right hand by Mrs. BD last month, to slow down my drinkin.

Centrist as we are, would they invite me to speak if I added a bow tie to my November cruise attire I am wearing in my photo? I have the outline of my talk all ready to go.

Or should I go totally macho, and wear my Lily trousers? Country club camo. Only a real man can wear their cool stuff, but I doubt they have my waist size at the shop at Sea Island.

That's Great Island out there, across from Chequessett Neck. I have done the Great Island long walk several times (8-10 miles). Last time, we saw the resident Great Horned Owl. On this trip, the heat defeated us before we got very far.

I recommend the hike as a way to immerse onself in the salty, piney goodness of the Outer Cape. (Bring hat, sneakers, and backpack with water and things to munch, or you will regret it.)

For me, my annual trek to the Cape is an annual (pagan?) re-baptism. I lived there until I was 5 or 6 (do not remember a thing), but have returned almost every year since then, often with extended family and often not. I believe I converted the now-Mrs. BD to me partly by taking her up there.

Or maybe it was a test to see whether the lovely, spirited young Jersey gal could love something that I loved. She did. Still does.

A fake tea party video is making the rounds. Totally manufactured. Politics at its most despicable.

Expect it to be widely distributed, since the political meme for July is "Dissidents = Racists." Boob bait for the bubbas is what I call this crap. Call me "offended."

Our shrink friend Shrinkwrapped terms this "possibly the best therapy session ever."

Cracked: The 6 Most Misguided Causes Ever Made Famous by Celebrities. Only six?

Dumb and dumber. You've probably seen this already somewhere: When Did John Edwards Become President of Vietnam?

To our friend Sissy: Take a chill pill, or a Cape Cod Marguerita. You will never have a pol in MA who will agree with you all the time about everything. Ideological purism does not work in politics, most places - and especially in the Northeast. If Brown is not re-elected, it will be a loss of all of us. More right than wrong is all one can hope for.

Poll: Obama tied with Palin for 2012. Interesting. She's really something - a celeb pol like the O was - but she is not my candidate. Not yet, anyway, because I have not had the chance to discuss the Federalist Papers with her yet. Our wise but truant poster Roger de Hauteville said that candidates are just figureheads on political ships, and no doubt Sarah makes a good one of those. In a funny kind of way, I think the O knows that he is a figurehead, and not a leader. Which is all for the best.

Ancient Buried Ship Found at Ground Zero Site. Not sure I would have used the word "ancient."

Politico: Why President Obama loses by winning

At AVI:

Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball took exception to a Tea Partier's comment "We're not racist, we're anticommunist." He claimed that this is exactly what the John Birch Society used to say, and went on to add "this is the old Dixie crowd."

Hello, Chris. That old Dixie crowd died with Dem Robert Byrd and the rest of the Dixiecrats

Bush's book: Decision Points

VDH: The Psychology of Recession - Obama and his team speak the language of redistribution and entitlements — not the language of opportunity and prosperity. And Main Street is listening.

They sure are. Nobody is hiring.

Berwick the Magnificent. Sheesh. Hypocritical Lefty putz.

NYT: When Did Cheating Become an Epidemic?

Being Traditionalists at Maggie's, we are opposed to cheating in many if not most circumstances.

Slate: Death of a Salesman- A slew of new polls suggest Obama is not a great pitchman for his policies.

Let the cracker cops die. What is this, a new race war?

Politico: On being labeled as 'racist'

Rove: My Biggest Mistake in the White House - Failing to refute charges that Bush lied us into war has hurt our country.

Krauthammer: Al Qaida not using affirmative action

Two terribly immature offerings from our Obama fans:

h/t, Black and Right:

In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.

Mother Teresa

Here's the most crowded beach we found in Cape Cod on the 4th weekend. Hope not to get accused of posting Charles Johnson-like pics.

I posted tons of Wellfleet architecture a couple of years ago, but here are some fresh ones from last week. Such a small town, I will run out of them fast, having already almost fully and unintentionally documented the village for posterity.

I include the antique, the regular, and the ordinary, while excluding the occasional eyesores.

From this interesting review of a new bio of E.M. Forster:

“Only connect” makes its entrance shortly after Margaret Schlegel, the novel’s liberal intellectual heroine, is first kissed by Henry Wilcox, the conservative businessman whom she has rather surprisingly agreed to marry. Passion has played little part in their relationship, and though they have gotten engaged they have not yet touched. When Wilcox suddenly embraces her, then, Margaret “was startled and nearly screamed,” and though she tries to kiss “with genuine love the lips that were pressed against her own,” she feels afterwards that “on looking back, the incident displeased her. It was so isolated. Nothing in their previous conversation had heralded it, and, worse still, no tenderness had ensued ... he had hurried away as if ashamed.” A few pages later, Margaret’s reflections on this erotic incompetence lead, as often happens in Forster’s fiction, into an authorial homily...

Forster, like CS Lewis and so many splendid writers, was a sexual innocent. Nothing wrong with that, in my view. Fun and diverting and even bonding as it may be, there is more to life than animal instincts. (Not that we disparage those, here at Maggie's Farm, where the animals shamelessly mate, feed, and drink at the drop of a hat.)

Not the legal definition, but close enough. Would you term this jetsam instead?. Some storm washed up this valuable antique on Cape Cod Bay.

Note again the crowded beaches which are better for bird-watching than babe-watching.

This humble old farmstead across the bay from Plymouth Colony was established in the 1650s, and is now within the Cape Cod National Seashore, up one of my secret Wellfleet sand road walking routes in the general vicinity of Duck Harbor.

Many regular visitors to Wellfleet do not know that Duck Harbor used to be a harbor, so this old place was a harborside farm. When currents and sand closed the opening to Cape Cod Bay long ago, most people moved to the big harbor in town (often with their whole houses, too. Lumber was in short supply.)

The original cabins from 1650 are long gone, but I cannot date these structures. Maybe some readers can. This is the main farmhouse, the chimney of which ought to provide a dating clue:

 More pics of the farm below the fold -

Re-posted from 2008. One quote:

Instead of inspiration the Democrat Party delivers shopworn socialist solution, numbing boredom, sheer despair, intellectual and spiritual poverty, sexism, and the worst sort of racism seen since it gave birth to the Klu Klux Klan. Classical racism loathes "the other." The new racism of the Democrat requires one loathe oneself first and last, and to accuse those that do not of racism. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, "The Democrats want to get you down in the hole that they're in."

Instead of telling us what sort of New Jerusalem it would have us build as our City on the Hill, the party requires that its members root about in the ghettos of the soul, to ponder the rightness or wrongness of the very babies of its opponents. Instead of waving the bright banners of America triumphant, the Party dons the rags and bones of defeatism and appeasement and moves about the country like a tarted-up Typhoid Mary, infecting all who kiss its chancred lips. As a party, it's a poxed whore for whom no condom is thick enough. It's a death trip.

Labash at Wkly Std: Living Like A Liberal - It’s hard work, politicizing your whole life. (It's only 2 1/2 pages).

It's about communities of true believers. In a way, I feel badly for these folks, seeking, as it seems to me, purpose, significance, a feeling of virtuousness - and maybe even transcendent meaning - in all the wrong places. In another way, I feel deeply annoyed with moonbats because I think these people aspire to control me and may view me as diabolical.

Harbor Freeze: the ice cream line at "Mac's" after suppertime. Mac makes pretty good fried clam bellies too.

Wellfleet Oysters and Wellfleet Littlenecks. My cocktail behind them is a Cape Cod Marguerita (cranberry juice added). Refreshing and healthily salt-restoring.

I have Wellfleet architecture in the pipeline, but my photos don't want to upload to the site right now.

Thanks to Hell In A Handbasket for alerting us to a worthy site, Women's Outdoor News.

And thanks to our buddy for this fine aviation site which we have seen before, Flight Level 390. I want that guy flying my airplane. With the machine on auto 99% of the time, what is there to do but sleep or blog?

View from the South Wellfleet Audubon lands, where the salt marsh meets the shore. Here be breeding Willets: