From Actual Air (Open City, 1999)
From The Minus Times #29, as republished in The Minus Times Collected.
I made as much of the mix I could on Spotify. D.C.3’s second record The Good Hex isn’t on there but it is on YouTube. Here is David Berman’s “Nashville Mix” mixtape:
“The Parable of the Blind”
by
William Carlos Williams
This horrible but superb painting
the parable of the blind
without a red
in the composition shows a group
of beggars leading
each other diagonally downward
across the canvas
from one side
to stumble finally into a bog
where the picture
and the composition ends back
of which no seeing man
is represented the unshaven
features of the des-
titute with their few
pitiful possessions a basin
to wash in a peasant
cottage is seen and a church spire
the faces are raised
as toward the light
there is no detail extraneous
to the composition one
follows the others stick in
hand triumphant to disaster
Biblioklept 