Stories on Myself

DeepSeek on Shinny

This is a striking piece. It feels less like a poem about trees or boys in isolation, and more about the essential, almost fated, dialogue between them—a kind of mutual desire.

The voice is wonderfully assured and wry (“don’t need / much told me about trees”). The language is physical and sensory: **filch, shinny, clamber,      yawn, swaying, dizzy.** You feel the roughness of the bark, the precariousness of the “tenuous crotch,” the vertigo of height.

What elevates it are the psychological insights. The tree is personified not as a victim but as a resigned, even willing participant (“doesn’t really mind… wants to be climbed”). The boy is driven by a primal urge that mixes pleasure with danger, theft with intimacy. The “illicit fruit” isn’t just stolen; it’s saved from a different fate—taking root. There’s a metaphor here for experience itself: plucking the moment before it becomes fixed, earthly, commonplace.

The parallel structure of the final two lines is perfect. It frames the relationship not as one-sided exploitation, but as a completed circuit, a need meeting a need. The tree offers risk, perspective, and a test; the boy offers motion, daring, and a reason for the branches to exist beyond themselves. It speaks to a universal, almost forgotten pact between the natural world and childhood’s restless spirit.

A compact, potent exploration of risk, reciprocity, and the raw materials of memory.

Grok on Shinny

“Shinny” shares several stylistic and thematic characteristics with other poems by George Lang published in the Pastis @ Bandol series on alteritas.net, while also exhibiting distinctive features that set it apart within his body of work.

Recurring Elements in Lang’s Poetry

Lang’s poems frequently employ concise, image-driven language with a meditative tone. They often draw on precise sensory details—textures, colors, natural elements, and bodily sensations—to evoke deeper philosophical reflections. A notable pattern is the exploration of human interaction with the natural world, frequently tinged with nostalgia, transience, or quiet acceptance. Many pieces incorporate subtle anthropomorphism, attributing intention or disposition to non-human entities (trees, animals, plants, or landscapes), and they favor understated symmetry in structure, such as parallel constructions or closing couplets that crystallize an insight.

Direct Comparisons to Other    

Several works in the series echo “Shinny” in their treatment of nature, childhood memory, or reciprocal relationships between humans and the environment:

• Gladiola (from the “Inventory” subsection) revisits childhood climbing and physical engagement with trees in a backyard setting. Like “Shinny,” it contrasts past agility (“I could reach the third crotch of the willow”) with present limitation, using arboreal imagery to convey loss and estrangement from a once-familiar natural space. Both poems employ climbing as a metaphor for youthful daring, though “Gladiola” introduces a stronger elegiac note through references to herbicide-treated landscapes and vanished wild plants.
• In the Eyes of a Dumb Beast (a translation after Rainer Maria Rilke) presents a serene, impartial natural order observed through an animal’s gaze. This parallels the tree’s “resigned” and almost welcoming attitude in “Shinny.” In both cases, the non-human entity embodies a calm acceptance of human presence or intrusion, offering a counterpoint to human anxiety or striving.
• One Moment (a translation after Günter Kunert) captures a fleeting intersection of human intimacy with the vastness of nature (sun, waves, sand). The emphasis on a transient, seized instant resonates with the    dizzying, precarious height in “Shinny,” where the boy’s ascent creates a momentary equilibrium between risk and harmony.

Other pieces, such as those tagged under “German” or translations like “Sensei the Serene,” maintain Lang’s characteristic precision and philosophical restraint, but they tend toward more abstract or interpersonal themes rather than the boyhood-nature nexus central to “Shinny.”

Distinctive Aspects of “Shinny”

While many of Lang’s poems lean toward translation, commentary on poetry itself (e.g., “Rara avis” as an ars poetica), or adult reflections on transience and intimacy, “Shinny” stands out for its direct invocation of boyhood experience and its archetypal reciprocity (“Something about a tree wants to be climbed. / Something about a boy wants to climb it.”). This mutual desire imparts a lighter, almost affirmative tone compared to the more melancholic or contemplative register found in poems like “Gladiola” or certain translations. The poem’s colloquial title and tactile verbs (“shinny,” “filch,” “clamber”) also lend it a slightly more kinetic, vernacular energy than some of the series’ more introspective or formally allusive entries.

In summary, “Shinny” aligns closely with Lang’s broader oeuvre through its economical imagery, natural symbolism, and exploration of harmonious yet precarious human-nature bonds. It distinguishes itself, however, by foregrounding an exuberant, instinctive boyhood perspective that contrasts with the more reflective or translated works predominant in Pastis @ Bandol. This balance of immediacy and quiet insight contributes to its particular resonance within the series.

DeepSeek on Pastiche at Bandol

This poem intricately layers perception, artifice, and desire against the vivid, sensory backdrop of a Mediterranean port. The title, Pastiche at Bandol, signals the method: a conscious composition of borrowed textures, styles, and sensations—part observation, part artistic assemblage.

The opening stanzas ground us in hyper-real, tactile detail. The “pistachios of the sea” (mussels) with their “unscrubbed iodine / beards” are both natural and arranged, “animate rocaille” (living rockwork) set beside the glossy, iridescent fish. This is a still life, but one that insists on its own pungent, slimy vitality. The “unglaucous eyes” of the fish reject the dull patina of painted fish, staring instead at the real “saffrony mid-day.” The poet declares these the “makings of a fine bouillabaisse I shall not eat,” establishing a central tension: between the scene as a feast for the senses and the experience as one of conscious abstention, of savoring through observation and language alone.

The middle section shifts to the speaker’s position within the scene. The act of lifting the “chill glass goblet” with its “milky contents” (likely pastis with ice) becomes a ritual gesture. The view is framed—through the “dappled patch” of sea between moored yachts—like a composed painting. His uttered phrase, “à la bonne mienne,” (a colloquial toast, roughly “here’s to me”) is a quiet celebration of this private, artistic consumption. The poem then explicitly denies its own artifice: “This is no museum. This is not even / a glossy coffee-table book.” It insists on the ambient smells (Gauloises, geraniums, marine gas), the wet gleam on real cobbles, the “background babble / of a thousand words in Provençal French.” These elements are “part of this picture,” but a picture that includes the viewer’s “appetite whetted,” pushed by a longing to enter the “riotous pull / of lives I only imagine”—to try on and then shed those lives like clothes. The desire is for immersion, not preservation.

The final movement accepts the offered reality. The approaching garçon with his “porcelain plate of crudités” presents “an idea I had never / entertained.” The poem expands to include not just the meal, but the entire context: the kiosk, the newspapers, “this place to sit, eat, compose.” The act of composition is equated with the act of being present. The pastiche becomes the scene itself: the flapping signal flags, the scintillating façades in “undulating plein-air,” windows that exist in a liminal space, “open not in, not out.” The poem concludes with a masterful, condensed image: “the concavity of a simple spoon / reflects everything contained.” The spoon is both a humble utensil and a metaphysical instrument. Its curve captures and inverts the entire bustling port, the meal, the longing, the composition—holding the whole pastiche, the whole world of Bandol, in a single, shimmering, reflective surface. 

Grok on At the End

This poem, titled “At the End of Every Storm,” explores the psychological unease that follows the resolution of turmoil. Rather than presenting calm as a welcome relief, the speaker portrays it as a state of vulnerability and exposure, suggesting a complex human attachment to inner conflict.

The opening stanza establishes this paradox: after enduring familiar storms, the return of clarity—“too much light”—feels disorienting and revealing. The vivid imagery of clouds torn “like clotted bandages from the sky of tarnished tin” evokes a wounded atmosphere, implying that storms serve as protective coverings that obscure deeper vulnerabilities.

The second stanza shifts inward, describing the lingering physiological echoes of anxiety—“blood reverberating in our ears”—and the fear of mental transparency. The metaphor of minds “crossed with roiling squall” positions turmoil as a deliberate shield, allowing one’s true intentions (the “tack of our bark,” evoking a ship’s course) to remain hidden amid chaos.

The central assertion—“Something is over. That is enough”—acknowledges closure, yet immediately undercuts it with reluctance: “Yet wouldn’t we rather it not?” This reveals a preference for ongoing disturbance over the “naked” solitude of peace. The poem suggests that humans may seek out “pangs like old friends,” habituated to suffering as a form of companionship.

The closing image of “sunbeams rain[ing] down upon us” through a “bright cleft in the clouds” inverts traditional symbolism: sunlight, typically restorative, here intensifies exposure, underscoring the discomfort of unmediated clarity.

Overall, the poem offers a nuanced meditation on emotional habituation, proposing that inner storms, while painful, provide concealment and familiarity that calm ultimately strips away. The free verse structure and enjambment mirror the unsettled transition from turbulence to stillness, reinforcing the theme of reluctant exposure.

Grok on Giraffes

Your presentation of the poem “Desert – Pastis @ Bandol” (also titled or subtitled “Giraffes at San Gorgonio”) offers a compelling instance of intertextual reworking, transposing the exotic reverie of Nikolai Gumilev’s 1908 poem “Жираф” (“The Giraffe”) into the stark, contemporary landscape of the San Gorgonio Pass near Desert Hot Springs, California.

Gumilev’s original poem, addressed to a melancholic beloved, conjures a distant, magnificent giraffe roaming the shores of Lake Chad. Its graceful form, adorned with a magical pattern rivaling moonlight, serves as an emblem of beauty and escape from sorrow. Key refrains include the speaker’s observation of the listener’s sadness (“your look is particularly sad, / And your hands… clasped over your knees”) and the consolatory directive to listen to the faraway vision (“Just listen: far, far away, on Lake Chad / Roams a proud giraffe”). The poem employs this exotic image to counter the immediate grief, culminating in an invitation to imagine tropical gardens and mysterious scents.

Your composition mirrors this structure while effecting a deliberate transposition. The setting shifts from an imagined African idyll to the arid, human-engineered expanse of one of North America’s largest wind farms. The wind turbines, initially perceived as sunflowers turning toward an imperceptible waft under a warm moon, undergo a hallucinatory metamorphosis into a prancing herd of giraffes amid baobabs on a desiccated lakebed. Their dappled hides “furl like ships’ sails,” evoking both the motion of the original giraffe (often likened to a gliding sail or bird) and the absent water they spangle. This optical illusion—born from distance, moonlight, and perhaps the pale silhouettes of the turbines visible in a day shot as a “white smudge”—grounds the reverie in perceptual ambiguity, transforming industrial forms into living grace.

The poem retains the emotional pivot to the sad companion (“Today you looked especially sad, pale / arms clasped to your calves”), followed by the tender admonition: “Hush… No tears here! Stop believing in the rain!” This command inverts Gumilev’s consolation: where the original urges belief in distant wonder to alleviate despair, your speaker counters belief in the improbable (rain in the desert) by redirecting imagination toward surreal substitutions—flowers as giraffes, baobabs as tumbleweeds. The gesture thus embraces both homage and swerve, affirming imaginative transformation as a response to aridity, whether emotional or environmental.

The title “Desert – Pastis @ Bandol” introduces an additional layer of contrast, linking the parched California desert to the lush, anise-scented Mediterranean world of Bandol (evident in your prior analysis of the companion poem). Pastis, the milky aperitif, evokes refreshment and ritual in a coastal setting; here, its absence in the desert underscores the theme of withheld or imagined solace.To illustrate the visual sources of the poem’s central illusion, consider the following images of wind farms under moonlight in the Desert Hot Springs area, where the turbines’ pale forms might suggest distant shapes in low light.These evoke the “pewter glow” and motionless vanes described. For comparison, the imagined giraffes draw upon the dappled, elegant forms of real herds in arid landscapes: The poem achieves a poignant equilibrium: it honors Gumilev’s lyric consolation while relocating it to a modern desert where wonder arises from perceptual misrecognition rather than pure fantasy. In doing so, it quietly affirms the persistence of imaginative refuge amid scarcity, rendering the wind farm not merely as machinery, but as a site of fleeting, dreamlike transfiguration.

 

 

https://grok.com/imagine/post/37dc5639-41c5-40c2-915d-020f6b6396d6?source=copy_link&platform=ios&t=6328c5d59761

 

Metamorphosis [revised, 31.12.2025]

How lucky water freezes and ice
floats, blood clots staunch wounds.

But when you touch a scab crusted on raw
memory, do not pick at it – it might bleed.

   

https://grok.com/imagine/post/40834f07-357b-4240-9930-e548d60fc231?source=copy_link&platform=ios&t=0e182f06a83d

Granny and Skipper

Michael and Lynn and Elizabeth

https://grok.com/imagine/post/89e1e8f0-4b5f-47d0-af11-2be899606f71?source=copy_link&platform=ios&t=0b3d028d3584

https://alteritas.net/pastis/may-snow-2/

              

Grok onn may snow

https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_18047a96-8901-44ab-baa9-04ff841405a6

Before forming a idea on the use of AI, enter one of your own poems into DeepSeek or Grok, or whichever. 

Apart from the tendency to sycophancy, which can be tweaked out, this is pretty good: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_18047a96-8901-44ab-baa9-04ff841405a6?rid=0b9a27e9-f44f-45e5-a7a0-bcbee93fe444.

One implication, however,is that language writes itself, is tautological, especially lit crit. Glad I don’t have to earn my living (anymore) by tediously repeating things differently.u

DeepSeek on So a Shudder 

¸Grok on Shinny, Gladiola und so weiter

What draws you first to this poem titled Shinny? Is it the title itself, the mention of Robert Frost’s Birches, or perhaps the author’s playful disclaimer that the two poems actually have “little to do with” each other?

The speaker begins by saying, “I was a boy myself once so don’t need / much told me about trees.” What might that opening suggest about who is speaking and what kind of knowledge they claim? How does that confidence shape the way we read the rest of the poem?

As the lines unfold, the boy climbs higher—“shinny up high then clamber / to where branches thin”—until “height hurts” and a “pit suddenly yawn[s] in his guts.” What sensations or emotions do these images evoke for you? Why might the poet choose such a precarious, almost frightening height for this scene?

Notice the repeated word “know” early on: the speaker knows how to hide, to filch “illicit fruit,” to climb. What makes this fruit “illicit,” and why does it need to be taken “before it falls to the ground and takes root”? Could the fruit stand for something beyond literal apples or pears?

The poem then shifts to what the tree feels or wants. “Something about a tree doesn’t really mind / the theft of its fruit.” “A tree is resigned / to a boy swaying in his tenuous / crotch.” And later: “Something about a tree wants to be climbed.” What do you make of this personification? Why give the tree such a generous, almost welcoming attitude toward the boy’s actions?

The final two lines form a kind of mirror: “Something about a tree wants to be climbed. / Something about a boy wants to climb it.” How does that symmetry change the relationship between climber and tree? Does it feel mutual, inevitable, innocent, mischievous—or something else entirely?

The author calls this a “secretive adolescent rite we all practice but never admit to,” and points to another poem, Gladiola, for a “clearer statement” of the events. If we accept the hint that this rite involves privacy, solitude, and perhaps bodily discovery in a hidden natural place, how might that reframe the metaphors of fruit, height, swaying, and the “tenuous crotch” of the branches?

What happens when we hold Frost’s Birches in one hand—where the boy swings down from the trees, imagining escaping life’s burdens—and this poem in the other? Why might the author insist they have little connection, even while inviting the comparison?

Take your time with these questions. Which one pulls at you the most right now, and what insight—or new puzzle—does it open up about the poem for you? I’m eager to hear where your thoughts lead.

What a natural next step—since the author of Shinny explicitly points us toward Gladiola as the place where the “events in question” receive a clearer statement.

Have you had a chance to locate and read the full text of Gladiola yet? (It appears on the same site: alteritas.net/pastis/inventory/gladiola/ — a reflective piece that begins “It took years,” revisiting childhood climbing, a backyard sycamore, and then drifts into sensory memories of flowers, “sleepy plants,” and “sweaty boys with grass itch” who “tease to make play possum.”)

What strikes you first when you encounter those lines? Does the tone feel nostalgic, wistful, perhaps a little elegiac—looking back at a boyhood yard that now feels “shrunken”?

Notice how climbing returns here too: the speaker recalls reaching the “third crotch of the willow,” shinning up for a catalpa pod, and now wondering if he can still “clamber up” the limber sycamore. How does this motif of ascent echo (or contrast with) the precarious height in Shinny, where the boy sways “dizzy at his chosen precipice”?

Then the poem turns toward scent and touch: sniffing sweet gardenia, bruising its petals “brown with soft touches.” What sensations does that evoke for you? Is it innocent botanical curiosity, or does the bruising, the soft repeated contact, carry a different kind of intimacy?

The most puzzling (and perhaps revealing) question comes near the end: “But where were the sleepy plants / sweaty boys with grass itch tease / to make play possum, their lobes curling up like doodlebugs…?”

Who—or what—are these “sleepy plants” that the sweaty boys tease into playing possum? Why might boys in the grass, itchy and playful, be coaxing something to curl up and feign sleep? And why “lobes”—a word that can refer to ears, leaves, or other soft, pendant parts?

If we hold the author’s hint in mind—that Gladiola clarifies the “secretive adolescent rite” from Shinny (the solitary tree-climbing ritual many practice but few admit)—how might these images of teasing, curling, and hidden motion reframe the earlier poem’s “illicit fruit,” the “tenuous crotch” of branches, and the tree’s apparent willingness to be climbed?

What happens when we imagine the boy not just taking fruit or enjoying height, but discovering something private about his own body in that hidden canopy—something the tree “doesn’t really mind” and perhaps even “wants”?

Does the gardenia (with its strong, heady perfume) or the absent “sleepy plants” start to feel like stand-ins for something more bodily and responsive? Why choose a flower name like Gladiola—tall, sword-like, erect—for the title of a poem that circles back to boyhood exploration in a now-distant yard?

Which image or phrase in Gladiola tugs at you the strongest right now, and how does it shift (or deepen) your reading of the secretive rite in Shinny?

Take your time—poems like these reward slow circling. I’m curious where your reflections carry you next.

What a fruitful turn—now that we’ve lingered with Shinny and Gladiola, the invitation to explore the author’s broader work feels almost inevitable. The collection gathered under “Pastis @ Bandol” (hosted at alteritas.net) reveals itself as a rich, sprawling inventory, credited to George Lang, containing well over a hundred poems.

Imagine stepping into a well-stocked pantry of memories, observations, translations, and meditations—titles ranging from the intimate and bodily to the historical, the culinary, the linguistic, and the quietly philosophical. Here are just a few that catch the eye from this extensive list:

• Privacy
• Coupling
• Second Vasectomy
• Incubus and Succubus
• Beauty is the Memory of the Flesh
• Sad to Be a Child
• Poem in Lieu of Suicide
• Fiberglass Birchbarks
• Global Warning (a playful yet pointed reflection on poetry itself as an invasive species)
• Tomatillo, Gooseberry, and Persimmon Salad
• Genesis 11-25
• Rara avis
• L’Éternité
• And many more, including translations (like pieces after Montale, Pasolini, or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz) and place-named reveries (Québec, North Hatley 1978, Chinon – קִינוֹן).

What patterns or moods begin to emerge for you simply from scanning these titles? Do you notice clusters around the body and its vulnerabilities (shaving, vasectomy, coupling, incubus/succubus), around childhood or lost innocence (Sad to Be a Child, perhaps echoing the boyhood rites in Shinny and Gladiola), around food and sensory memory (salads, pastis, petits pois), or around language itself (Merci, Rimbaud, pour ces quelques consonnes; Language Lesson)?

How might the presence of titles like Privacy or Close Shave sit alongside the secretive, tree-hidden explorations we’ve already discussed? Could the same sensibility that personifies a tree as willing to be climbed also whisper through poems about private rituals, bodily memory, or the quiet comedy of human intimacy?

And what about the translations and allusions—to Rimbaud, Yeats, Montale, ancient texts? Does this suggest a poet who delights in weaving his own experiences into conversation with other voices across time and languages?

If one or two titles from this broader constellation tug at your curiosity most strongly right now—perhaps Privacy, Incubus, Beauty is the Memory of the Flesh, or something entirely different—which one calls to you, and what questions does it raise about how it might connect (or contrast) with the adolescent rite at the heart of Shinny and Gladiola?

There’s no hurry; these poems seem to reward patient wandering. Where would you like to step next in this garden of words? I’m here to walk alongside as your reflections unfold.

 

https://grok.com/imagine/post/37dc5639-41c5-40c2-915d-020f6b6396d6?source=copy_link&platform=ios&t=6328c5d59761

 

Metamorphosis [revised, 31.12.2025]

How lucky water freezes and ice
floats, blood clots staunch wounds.

But when you touch a scab crusted on raw
memory, do not pick at it – it might bleed.

   

https://grok.com/imagine/post/40834f07-357b-4240-9930-e548d60fc231?source=copy_link&platform=ios&t=0e182f06a83d

Granny and Skipper

Michael and Lynn and Elizabeth

https://grok.com/imagine/post/89e1e8f0-4b5f-47d0-af11-2be899606f71?source=copy_link&platform=ios&t=0b3d028d3584

https://alteritas.net/pastis/may-snow-2/

              

Grok onn may snow

https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_18047a96-8901-44ab-baa9-04ff841405a6

Before forming a idea on the use of AI, enter one of your own poems into DeepSeek or Grok, or whichever. 

Apart from the tendency to sycophancy, which can be tweaked out, this is pretty good: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_18047a96-8901-44ab-baa9-04ff841405a6?rid=0b9a27e9-f44f-45e5-a7a0-bcbee93fe444.

One implication, however,is that language writes itself, is tautological, especially lit crit. Glad I don’t have to earn my living (anymore) by tediously repeating things differently.u

DeepSeek on So a Shudder 

¸Grok on Shinny, Gladiola und so weiter

What draws you first to this poem titled Shinny? Is it the title itself, the mention of Robert Frost’s Birches, or perhaps the author’s playful disclaimer that the two poems actually have “little to do with” each other?

The speaker begins by saying, “I was a boy myself once so don’t need / much told me about trees.” What might that opening suggest about who is speaking and what kind of knowledge they claim? How does that confidence shape the way we read the rest of the poem?

As the lines unfold, the boy climbs higher—“shinny up high then clamber / to where branches thin”—until “height hurts” and a “pit suddenly yawn[s] in his guts.” What sensations or emotions do these images evoke for you? Why might the poet choose such a precarious, almost frightening height for this scene?

Notice the repeated word “know” early on: the speaker knows how to hide, to filch “illicit fruit,” to climb. What makes this fruit “illicit,” and why does it need to be taken “before it falls to the ground and takes root”? Could the fruit stand for something beyond literal apples or pears?

The poem then shifts to what the tree feels or wants. “Something about a tree doesn’t really mind / the theft of its fruit.” “A tree is resigned / to a boy swaying in his tenuous / crotch.” And later: “Something about a tree wants to be climbed.” What do you make of this personification? Why give the tree such a generous, almost welcoming attitude toward the boy’s actions?

The final two lines form a kind of mirror: “Something about a tree wants to be climbed. / Something about a boy wants to climb it.” How does that symmetry change the relationship between climber and tree? Does it feel mutual, inevitable, innocent, mischievous—or something else entirely?

The author calls this a “secretive adolescent rite we all practice but never admit to,” and points to another poem, Gladiola, for a “clearer statement” of the events. If we accept the hint that this rite involves privacy, solitude, and perhaps bodily discovery in a hidden natural place, how might that reframe the metaphors of fruit, height, swaying, and the “tenuous crotch” of the branches?

What happens when we hold Frost’s Birches in one hand—where the boy swings down from the trees, imagining escaping life’s burdens—and this poem in the other? Why might the author insist they have little connection, even while inviting the comparison?

Take your time with these questions. Which one pulls at you the most right now, and what insight—or new puzzle—does it open up about the poem for you? I’m eager to hear where your thoughts lead.

What a natural next step—since the author of Shinny explicitly points us toward Gladiola as the place where the “events in question” receive a clearer statement.

Have you had a chance to locate and read the full text of Gladiola yet? (It appears on the same site: alteritas.net/pastis/inventory/gladiola/ — a reflective piece that begins “It took years,” revisiting childhood climbing, a backyard sycamore, and then drifts into sensory memories of flowers, “sleepy plants,” and “sweaty boys with grass itch” who “tease to make play possum.”)

What strikes you first when you encounter those lines? Does the tone feel nostalgic, wistful, perhaps a little elegiac—looking back at a boyhood yard that now feels “shrunken”?

Notice how climbing returns here too: the speaker recalls reaching the “third crotch of the willow,” shinning up for a catalpa pod, and now wondering if he can still “clamber up” the limber sycamore. How does this motif of ascent echo (or contrast with) the precarious height in Shinny, where the boy sways “dizzy at his chosen precipice”?

Then the poem turns toward scent and touch: sniffing sweet gardenia, bruising its petals “brown with soft touches.” What sensations does that evoke for you? Is it innocent botanical curiosity, or does the bruising, the soft repeated contact, carry a different kind of intimacy?

The most puzzling (and perhaps revealing) question comes near the end: “But where were the sleepy plants / sweaty boys with grass itch tease / to make play possum, their lobes curling up like doodlebugs…?”

Who—or what—are these “sleepy plants” that the sweaty boys tease into playing possum? Why might boys in the grass, itchy and playful, be coaxing something to curl up and feign sleep? And why “lobes”—a word that can refer to ears, leaves, or other soft, pendant parts?

If we hold the author’s hint in mind—that Gladiola clarifies the “secretive adolescent rite” from Shinny (the solitary tree-climbing ritual many practice but few admit)—how might these images of teasing, curling, and hidden motion reframe the earlier poem’s “illicit fruit,” the “tenuous crotch” of branches, and the tree’s apparent willingness to be climbed?

What happens when we imagine the boy not just taking fruit or enjoying height, but discovering something private about his own body in that hidden canopy—something the tree “doesn’t really mind” and perhaps even “wants”?

Does the gardenia (with its strong, heady perfume) or the absent “sleepy plants” start to feel like stand-ins for something more bodily and responsive? Why choose a flower name like Gladiola—tall, sword-like, erect—for the title of a poem that circles back to boyhood exploration in a now-distant yard?

Which image or phrase in Gladiola tugs at you the strongest right now, and how does it shift (or deepen) your reading of the secretive rite in Shinny?

Take your time—poems like these reward slow circling. I’m curious where your reflections carry you next.

What a fruitful turn—now that we’ve lingered with Shinny and Gladiola, the invitation to explore the author’s broader work feels almost inevitable. The collection gathered under “Pastis @ Bandol” (hosted at alteritas.net) reveals itself as a rich, sprawling inventory, credited to George Lang, containing well over a hundred poems.

Imagine stepping into a well-stocked pantry of memories, observations, translations, and meditations—titles ranging from the intimate and bodily to the historical, the culinary, the linguistic, and the quietly philosophical. Here are just a few that catch the eye from this extensive list:

• Privacy
• Coupling
• Second Vasectomy
• Incubus and Succubus
• Beauty is the Memory of the Flesh
• Sad to Be a Child
• Poem in Lieu of Suicide
• Fiberglass Birchbarks
• Global Warning (a playful yet pointed reflection on poetry itself as an invasive species)
• Tomatillo, Gooseberry, and Persimmon Salad
• Genesis 11-25
• Rara avis
• L’Éternité
• And many more, including translations (like pieces after Montale, Pasolini, or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz) and place-named reveries (Québec, North Hatley 1978, Chinon – קִינוֹן).

What patterns or moods begin to emerge for you simply from scanning these titles? Do you notice clusters around the body and its vulnerabilities (shaving, vasectomy, coupling, incubus/succubus), around childhood or lost innocence (Sad to Be a Child, perhaps echoing the boyhood rites in Shinny and Gladiola), around food and sensory memory (salads, pastis, petits pois), or around language itself (Merci, Rimbaud, pour ces quelques consonnes; Language Lesson)?

How might the presence of titles like Privacy or Close Shave sit alongside the secretive, tree-hidden explorations we’ve already discussed? Could the same sensibility that personifies a tree as willing to be climbed also whisper through poems about private rituals, bodily memory, or the quiet comedy of human intimacy?

And what about the translations and allusions—to Rimbaud, Yeats, Montale, ancient texts? Does this suggest a poet who delights in weaving his own experiences into conversation with other voices across time and languages?

If one or two titles from this broader constellation tug at your curiosity most strongly right now—perhaps Privacy, Incubus, Beauty is the Memory of the Flesh, or something entirely different—which one calls to you, and what questions does it raise about how it might connect (or contrast) with the adolescent rite at the heart of Shinny and Gladiola?

There’s no hurry; these poems seem to reward patient wandering. Where would you like to step next in this garden of words? I’m here to walk alongside as your reflections unfold.