Over the past month, I have been slowly meandering through the first collection of Guy Davenport's essays, "The Geography of the Imagination." It requires of me a slow meander. The ideas and the concepts, the allusions and learned references demand more from me than I am used to. I am just a simply country fellow with no formal university education, so trying to keep up with one of the most classically learned people of the twentieth-century is quite an endeavor.

Anyway, I just read an essay on the American poet Charles Olson and in it, toward the end, Davenport quotes from Rimbaud's 'Une Saison en Enfer':

Si j'ai du gout, ce n'est gueres
Que pour la terre et les pierres.
Je dejeune toujours d'air
De roc, de charbons, de fer.

...or thereabouts:

If I have any taste,
It is for earth and stone.
I take for my meals
Rock, coal, and iron.

I first read Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' when I was in Eleventh grade. I read it, initially, to impress a girl who was parsecs ahead of me intellectually, emotionally, and in every other way. But I spied her reading Rimbaud and I wanted to have something in common with her. She would eventually leave the school to go to an alternative, gifted public school of the arts in the city where she would slowly, disastrously merge with the suburban-fueled city bohemianism and drug culture. I would see her years later at a hold-in-the-wall bar in Rochester and talk to her for hours about how she had fared in those several years. She still made references in French, but those words came from a mouth puckered and weary of a life lived at the level of pavement.

That was almost ten years ago.
I wonder where she is now, with her tastes for rock and coal and iron. I could only ever have offered her corn, Chard, and raspberries. No competition.