Globolo.

Gift of the Book

lights go off
all over
rhode island
everyone falls
into bed
I stay awake
reading
rereading
the long-awaited
prose
of your
body
stunned
by the hunger

C. D. Wright

Kapaneus (inscribed in Etruscan letters as Capne) struck by Zeus' thunderbolt.
Carnelian scarab. Etruscan, from Populonia, ca. 480–45 BCE. Plethoras.

GLOBOLO. As in globular. Inclined towards rotundity. In the 4th-3rd century BCE, Etruscans perfected globolo-style carvings useing rounded drill bits in varying sizes to carve figures into carnelian. Carnelian is the color of raw carne in romanian or maybe Latin. I’m staring at one side of a scarab gemstone with the carving of a dog in globo-style. The other side gives me a simple scarab beetle.Two-sided gemstone carvings served as seals for the Etruscans. There are two sides to everything including sealant which reminds me of a letter Philip Guston wrote to Ross Feld in September 1979, as if opening the whole symphony with a confession— “I don’t — can’t — write letters anymore — am writing this one in blood.” Dashes make the blood splatter over the walls and the linoleum and yet Guston said Feld’s letter had hit him like an earthquake. I remember wondering if one was coming as I walked along a shore in Santa Monica twenty years ago. “A miracle . . . that all you say — every word, matches my own sensations and thoughts,” Guston muttered. Look, I’ll say it, he continues in this letter — “You are Valery — Proust, and I must be Cezanne.” We are always the icons in our early notebooks the eldest daydreams come back to rouse us at our best. We crotchet these selves for the pleasures recuperated in the words and images of others. I dream of my mother with two paper airplanes folded near her head.