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El Nuevo Camino del Rio de San Antonio
Thursday, October 29, 2009 IV.10.5. My photos this week are from a walk I took down the recently extended portion of the San Antnio Riverwalk, which goes north from the original downtown section, past the San Antonio Art Museum and on to the Zoo and the Witte Museum. I haven't done all of the new part yet (it's a very long walk), but will soon, while the weather's cool. Eventually the Riverwalk will also be extended south, presentng a hike-able, bike-able paved path along the rive all the way to Mission Espada, the furhermost of the old Spanish missions. As to our poetry, here's the cast and crew for this week. Origin of the Marble Forest A Moment Dark Night The Vase The Hinge Looking Back Me midgetly lurking vulture pigeons Dana Gioia The End of the World Paul Mills Amazonas Cornelia DeDona Dim Sum in Chinatown W. S. Merwin Unknown Age My Hand What the Bridges Hear Long Afternoon Light Me a great night for football Ryokan The Inn at Tamagawa Station Cornelia DeDona Golden Tilapia John Ashbery Lost Footage The Red Easel Me tough love Paul Celan Deathfugue Cornelia DeDona What Color Do You Breathe Janice Gould The Day of the Dead Me all together, now Cornelia DeDona Boogey Fever Me fini Philip Larkin Annus Mirabilis Cut Grass Me about the politics of grumpity crapity old men  I start this week with several poems by another poet new to me, Gregory Orr, from his book City of Salt, published in 1995 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Born in 1947 in Albany, New York, Orr grew up in the rural Hudson Valley and, for a year, in a hospital in the hinterlands of Haiti. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including City of Salt, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Poetry Prize in 1995. He is also the author of a memoir, The Blessing, which was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the fifty best nonfiction books the year, and three books of essays. Orr has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, he was presented the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence, where he worked on a study of the political and social dimension of the lyric in early Greek poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. I really do like this poet. Origin of the Marble Forest Childhood dotted with bodies. Let them go, let them be ghosts. No, I said, make them stay, make them stone. A Moment The field where my brother died - I've walked there since Weeds and grasses, some chicory stalks; no trace of the scene I can still see: a father and his sons bent above a deer they'd shot, then screams and shouts. Always I arrive too late to take the rifle from the boy I was, too late to warn him of what he can't imagine: how quickly people vanish; how one moment you're standing shoulder to shoulder, the next you're alone in a field. A Dark Night How I long to pull the old man in; he's thrashing out there in the water, he's drunk and can't swim. Then again, maybe it's a dog and he'll claw and bite me as I lean from the small boat to haul him up. The splashing so near and those sounds - are they growls or a humans choaked sobs? How dark it is, how far I am from shore. The Vase Boredom and terror, and the older I get the more terror arrives dressed as boredom, wearing the same clothes I wear to work each day. Returning, I empty my pockets into a large vase in the hall; bits of lint, scraps of paper, loose change, a piece of string. The vase is taller than I am, blazoned with white chrysanthemums and green, exotic birds in flight. The Hinge On it the whole world turns if the world is a door, and if the world is not a door how to explain the movement seen in the butterfly's stiff wings as it flutters on a purple bush, or the arms of lovers thrown open on their equally precise pivots And the hinge screams as it yields though no one's there., though it's only the breeze. Looking Back Marble pillars of palace or temple - so what? I've seen them tumbled by vines And our beautiful bodies - how long will they last? Shallow valley where we lay down crushing a circle in tall grass. Above it our ghosts drifted in rowboats among low clouds, letting it down lines of sunlight with tiny golden hooks.  Feeling a little silly a few days ago, and not so deeply inspired when it came time to write my poem of the day. midgetly lurking vulture pigeons pigeons ledge-lurk like midget city vultures waiting for an Iowa-farmer to swoop through the city streets in a brilliantly-red biplane, dropping corn for midget-vulture-pigeons or a puffing-steaming locomotive spewing pink popcorn from its puffy-steamer smokingstack or a grimly-grimy trawler crawling on little ballooning-tires from street to street shaking pinkly-pretty popcorn shrimp from its net all for midgetly-vulting pigeons lackadaisically ledgly-lurking or Mr. Theodore Roosevelt-Shrimp primly passing in his permanently pressed plaid shirt and grey-spackled fedora given to him on his 63rd birthday by the late Mrs. Shirley Simpson-Swindle-Shrimp, the love of his Shrimply life all this those pigeonly midgeted vultureous lazy ledged lurkers could be awaiting from their ledgerous lair or it could be for something else entirely who knows what they might be thinking as they lurkishly ledgisly perch not me  Next, I have two poems from Earth Songs, an anthology of contemporary eco-poetry, published by Green Books in 2002. The first poem is by Dana Gioia, a poet and critic who retired early from his career as a corporate executive at General Foods to write full-time. From January 29, 2003, until January 22, 2009, he was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, our Federal arts agency, working to revitalize an organization that had suffered bitter controversies about the nature of grants to artists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gioia sought to encourage jazz, which he calls the only uniquely American form of art, to promote reading and performance of William Shakespeare and to increase the number of Americans reading literature. Before taking the NEA post, Gioia was a resident of Santa Rosa, California, and before that, of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. The End of the World "We're going," they said, "to the end of the world". So they stopped the car where the river curled, And we scrambled down beneath the bridge On the gravel track of a narrow ridge. We tramped for miles on a wooded walk Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk. Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore. We came to a bend, where the river grew wide And green mountains rose on the opposite side. My guides moved back. I stood alone, As the current streaked over smooth flat stone. Shelf by shelf the river fell. The white water goosetailed with eddying swell. Faster and louder the current dropped Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped. I stood at the edge where the mist ascended, My journey done where the world ended. I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky, The sound of water, and the water's reply. The next poem from the book is by Paul Mills, the poet, performance artist, rock journalist, and civil rights lawyers, known, I think, early in his career as "Poez." Amazonas Straight out of the Pacific grooves of rock that peak the clouds with ice splinter into rivers running East. Cloud-forests melting in July, the Amazon at its source, jungle of island-fringes a horizon dividing water and sky: two azures, evolving soft ephemera of trees through which monkeys crash, birds cry out, howls liquefy, great white egrets coil downward into extreme sculpture. Here is where he river begins to move headlong at terrible speed into the earth. Thrilling with Andes snow delivering rainclouds, fruit, vines, water, the vast drainage of Amazon seeks every outlet inlet and lake, and moves through it sometimes will not move sometimes like to drift in a still depth fringed by insect-floating growth, peacock fish slothlike green canopies of trees. But will reach salt water. Dying into the earth's future, Amazonas - living with its trees a few million years together in their best of times secretly. Alert to floating damage, torn-off roots the shaman steers crouched, a human rudder, then in a liquid wilderness of glints steering us through needles of black palm, knowing where the simple secrets grow trance-inducing vines, eyes like beetles running among leaves where trees flower - So that night we drank his drug of bark growing in our ears the drumming of millions of insects, nightjars, frogs, seemed like a city's steady traffic hum heard from an open skylight or a street, all sound vacuumed from the trees into a jet of planet-circling air, as over mountains our small plane broke through the seal of mist into a wide entrance of green heat, rivers coiled like empty asphalt tracks. father and son - steering words, moving upstream. Alligator eyes caught red in flash-beams in the reeds. Upstream to the coolness of our camp. The moment being given to us again - that we were here and saw the rim of the galaxy, a shapely arc, huts on the shores, after-sunset handling of nets, all of it blowing through us gusts of elation, sharp joy - the Milky Way, slant of the Southern Cross, riding in that boat against the wind  I have four poems this week from our friend Cornelia DeDona. They are from her new book, Boogey Fever. You can read more about this book, as well as her previous two books at Born in Germany and raised in New York. Cornelia, or, Connie, has lived for the past 32 yrs. with her husband in Hawaii. She has traveled extensively both here in the U.S. and abroad. She is a "Friend" to the National League of American Pen Women and the Friends of the Library in Honolulu. She subscribes to Blueline Poetry, an online poetry forum, where she posts a poem a day. She is also a member of the Academy of American Poets. This is the first of our four poems from Connie. The other three will appear later. Dim Sum in Chinatown We met at ten thirty on a Sunday morning for Dim Sum - a bit of heart, in a busy Chinatown restaurant. The Yum Cha (drinking tea) experience took me back to China. To a trip of a lifetime. To an industrious dynamic people with backs bent in two using simple tools to rebuild modern cities reeking of inadequate plumbing and garbage strewn harbors. To discern these proud inhabitants of decay from five star hotels with a hazy blackened view. Where east encounters west and rich confronts poor devoid of birds and trees to block out the sun, face to face. Somewhere inside the debris lies the heart of these proud people as inside a wrapper of translucent rice flour stuffed with pork shrimp and cabbage.  Seems like I'm doing a lot of M. S. Merwin, maybe because he is great to read, especially good at finding the truth of things in very few words. The next several short poems are from his book, The Shadow of Sirius, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2008. Unknown Age For all the features it hoards and displays age seems to be without substance at any time whether morning or evening it is a moment of air held between the hands like a stunned bird while I stand remembering light in the trees of another century on a continent long submerged with no way of telling whether the leaves at that time felt memory as they were touching the day and no knowledge of what happened to the reflections on the pond's surface that were never seen again the bird lies still while the light goes on flying My Hand See how the past is not finished here in the present it is awake the whole time never waiting it is my hand now but not what I held it is not my hand but what i held it is what I remember but it never seems quite the same no one else remembers it a house long one into air the flutter of tires over a brick road cool light in a finished bedroom the flash of the oriole between one life and another the river a child watched What the Bridges Hear Even the right words if ever we come to them tell of something the words never knew celestial for sunlight or starlight for starlight so at this moment there my be words somewhere among the nebulae for the two bridges across the wide rock-strewn river part way around the bend from each other in the winter sunlight late in the afternoon more than half a century ago with the sound of the water rushing under them and passing between them unvarying and inaudible it is still there so is the late sunlight of that winter afternoon although the winter has vanished and the bridges are still reaching across the wide sound of being there Long Afternoon Light Small roads written in sleep in the foothills how long ago and I believed you were lost with the bronze then deepening in the light and the shy moss turning to itself holding its own brightness above the badger's path while a single crow sailed west without a sound we trust without giving it a thought that we will always see it as we see it once and that what we know is only a moment of what is ours and will stay we believe it as the moment slips away as lengthening shadows merge in the valley and a window kindles there like a first star what we see again comes to us in secret  We had four beautiful days in a row last week - the challenge, to think of what to do with them. a great night for football another blue-sky no-cloud day, cool and calm, third in a row, traffic on San Pedro flows like a rush of white water, a river of urban escapees in a hurry to take in what looks like the best weekend in the past and probably future twelve months Chris is off for several days of hiking and camping in the Guadalupe Mountains, dry and remote, hanging out on the Texas/New Mexico edge between high desert and mountains the promise of a great football night enticing us, Dee and i just have to decide who we want to see crushed tonight - both our preferred teams in the cellar, fresh meat for the bloody maws of this year's Goliaths - no Davids in our stable, no deadly slingshot, no hand of God directing our aim - it's a win/don't win situation, they win, our guys don't, serving, instead, only to be slain, to be smashed, to be strewn in bloody body parts between forever-out-of-reach goal posts.... to be examples, in a political/philosophical sense, of the fate of weakness in this land of tough and ready, this field of great hits and end runs, this grand wail of stomp the muthafuckers till they bleed through their toes a great day today and a great night ahead, a great night for sleeping in the desert, a great night for dinner and drinks and some nookie under a midnight canvas of more stars then there is time to count, a great night for football, a great night for some good Friday evening's entertainment watching our children beat the crap out of each other  Though born in Japan in the eighteenth century, the hermit-monk Ryokan lived and wrote firmly in the tradition of the great Zen eccentrics of China and Japan. The following poem is from a collection of his works, One Robe, One Bowl, published in it's fifteenth printing in 2005 by Weatherhill of Boston and London. The poems in the book were translated by John Stevens. The Inn at Tamagawa Station Mid autumn - the wind and rain are now at their most melancholy. A wanderer, my spirit is inseparable from this difficult road. During the long night, dreams float from the pillow - Awake suddenly, I have mistaken the sound of the river for the voice of the rain. ~~~~~ Carrying firewood on my shoulder I walk in the green mountains along the bumpy path. I stop to rest under a tall pine; Sitting quietly, I listen to the spring song of the birds. ~~~~~ Early summer - floating down a clear running river in a wooden boat, A lovely girl gently plays with a crimson lotus flower held in her white hands. The day becomes more and more brilliant. Young men play along the shore and a horse runs by the willows. Watching quietly, speaking to no one, The beautiful girl does not show that her heart is broken. ~~~~~ Since I came to this hermitage How many years have passed? If I am tired I stretch out my feet; If I feel fine I go for a stroll in the mountains. Following my destiny, for this body I have received from my parents I have only thanks. ~~~~~ Near a Kannon temple, I have a temporary hermitage; Alone, yet the intimate friend of a thousand green poems written on the surrounding foliage. Sometimes in the morning I put on my priest's mantle And go down to the village to beg food for this old body. ~~~~~ At night, deep in the mountains I sit in zazen. The affairs of men never reach here. In the stillness I sit on a cushion across from the empty window. The incense has been swallowed up by the endless night; Unable to sleep, I walk into the garden; Suddenly, above the highest peak, the round moon appears. ~~~~~ Day and night the cold wind blows through my robe. In the forest, only fallen leaves; Wild chrysanthemums can no longer be seen. Next to my hermitage there is an ancient bamboo grove; Never changing, it awaits my return. ~~~~ Once again, many greedy people appear No different from the silkworms wrapped in cocoons. Wealth and riches are all they love, Never giving their minds or bodies a moment's rest. Every year their natures deteriorate While their vanity increases. One morning death comes before They can use even half their money. Others happily receive the estate, And the deceased's name is soon lost in darkness. For such people there can only be great pity. ~~~~~ My hut, located in a distant village, is little more than four bare walls. Once I was a mendicant monk, wandering here and there, staying nowhere long. Recalling the first day of my pilgrimage, years ago - How high my spirits were! ~~~~~ The autumn nights have lengthened And the cold has begun to penetrate my mattress. My sixtieth year is near, Yet there is no one to take pity on this weak old body. The rain has finally stopped; now just a thin stream trickles from the roof. All night the incessant cry of insects: Wide awake, unable to sleep. Leaning on my pillow, I watch the pure bright rays of sunrise.  Now here's the second of our four poems from Cornelia DeDona. Golden Tilapia Your muscles are tanned and lean Your piercing blue eyes are patient and see everything. It is morning. The throw net is draped over your left shoulder. As you wait for the precise moment to hurl the net. The first throw directs the next and with each pass more and more are harvested and released onto the dew soaked grass. In their final struggle to stay alive they arch and flip back and forth across the void to escape back into the cool dark water beneath the lily pads. However their fates are set filleted without delay resulting in one last swim breaded in hot oil.  Here are two poems by John Ashbery from his book Where Shall I Wander, published in 2005 by HarperCollins. Ashbery is a modern poet about whom much has been written. I don't see a need for me to add to it. Lost Footage You said, "Life's a hungry desert." or something like that. I couldn't hear. The curving path escorts us to Armida's pavilion. The enchantress. She had everything built slightly smaller than life size, as you'll find if you sit in the chair at that table. And clean - everything is terribly clean, from the crumbs casting long shadows on the breadboard, to the gnats churning in the open window. We can't mask the anxiety for long, but we can produce good and cherishable deed to be ransacked by those who come after us. True, no one visits anymore. I used to think it was because of him, now I think it's because of him and us. We grow more fragile at our posts, interrogating vacant night. "Who goes there?" And he goes, "Nay, stand and unfurl yourself." I thought, in the corner, in the canyon, in the cupboard, was something that seized me in a terrible but approachable embrace. All was silent except the pedals of the loom. from which a tapestry streams in bits and pieces. "I don’t care how you do it." I can see the subject, an eagle with Ganymede in his razor-clam claws, against a sky of mottled sun and storm clouds. From that, much vexation. The Red Easel Say doc, those swags are of the wrong period though in harmony with the whole. You shouldn't take it too hard. Everybody likes it when the casual drift becomes more insistent, setting in order the house while writing finis to its three-decker novel. Only when the polaint of hens pierces dusk like a screen door does the omnipresent turn top-heavy. Oh really? I thought they had names for guys like you and places to take them to. That's true, but let's not be hasty, shall we, and pronounce your example a fraud before all the returns are in? These are, it turns out, passionate and involving, as well as here to stay.  I'm tired of putting up with grumpy people. Might have to get grumpy myself. tough love sometimes i think i must be an exception since it seems every person i see over age 40 is pissed off about something, everything 85 percent of my relatives, republicans, democrats, sinners, saints, welfare mothers, business chiefs, main street, back street, side street, Wall Street, blue collar, white collar, pink collar, all of them pissed about one thing or another, often at each other, about each other like the guy in the chair ahead of me at the barbershop, getting his ears lowered, pounding Armando, the barber, with a litany of sonsabitches screwing him one way or another, down on everything and everyone but his wife, that single exception probably only because she was in the chair next to me, within hearing distance of the verbal rampage, probably accustomed to hearing it all, the reason she's always pissed off at him and everything that pisses him off because that's the reason she has to spend days and nights listening to his monologue - oh, would that it would be internal, crap, crap, crap, always living with it, all the better things, the beautiful things of life, pushed into the shadows by his unending rush of crap, knee deep in his drivel all the days and hours of her life i understand - 15 minutes of listening to him while i wait my turn in the chair and i'm ready to go slap the shit out of him myself - grow up, man, it's not the world's fault you're a dipshit, i'd like to tell him, it's because of your dipshitting ways, so quit complaining and put on a happy face, a smiley face like mine, see me smile, that's the way you ought to be living, don't let things get to you, follow my lead, be like me, smile pass it on  The next poem by Paul Celan, from the book of poems selected and introduced by Robert Hass from the anthology Poet's Choice - Poems for Everyday Life. The book was published by HarperCollins in 1998. The introductions by Hass are especially well done and helpful. Celan was a Jewish poet born in 1920 and educated in the traditions of German poetry. He lost both his parents in the concentration camps and barely survived them himself. He struggled most of his life with the contradiction of writing in a language he loved that was also the language of his family's murderers. He committed suicide in 1970 when he was 49 years old. Hass praised the translation of this poem by John Felstiner, particularly the way Felstiner allowed the poem to slip back into German at the end, a symbol of the poet's lifelong struggle with the language. Deathfugue Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening we drink it at middday and morning we drink it at night we drink and we drink we shovel a grave in the air there you you won't lie too cramped A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling he whistles his hounds to come close he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground he commands us ply up for the dance Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped He shouts jab this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are so blue jab your spades deeper you lot there you other play on for the dancing Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening we drink and we drink a man lives in the house your goldenes Harr Margareta Your aschenes Haar Schulamith he plays with his vipers He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise then as smoke to the sky you'll have a grave then in the clouds there you won't lie too cramped Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland we drink you at morning and evening we drink and we drink this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue he shoot you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true a man lives in the house hour goldenes Haar Margarete he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete deil aschenes Haar Sulamith  Now, here's number three of the four poems by Connie DeDona in this issue. What Color Do You Breathe I exhale a blue language of nouns and verbs. My syntax frozen, in the atmosphere hidden, on a cloud high above Mauna Kea. In search of exclusive metaphors while observing the Nene as it forages for food, between the cracks and crevices of black and gold lava flows, hardened by decades of cooling. Now joined by violet joy bushes and a profusion of bright green tree ferns, still erupting into red phrases congealing into the deep blue pacific, crimson orange tongues ablaze.  No way I can publish on the day before Halloween without a poem for the occasion. This one was written by Janice Gould and it is also taken from Poet's Choice. Gould is a poet from California of European and Koykangk'auwsi Maidu ancestry. She lives in Santa Fe and has taught American Indian literature at the University of Santa Fe in Albuquerque. The Day of the Dead I wish it were like this: el dia de los muertos comes and we fill our baskets with bread, apples,chicken, and beer, and go out to the graveyard. We bring flowers with significant colors - yellow, crimson, and gold - the strong, hungry colors of life, full of saliva and blood. We sit on the sandy mounds and I play my accordion. It groans like the gates of hell. The flames of the votives flicker in the wind. My music makes everything sway, all the visible and invisible - friends, candles, ants, the wind. Because for me life ripens, and for now it's on my side though it's true I am often afraid. I wear my boots when I play the old squeeze-box, and stomp hard rhythms till the headstones dance on their graves.  Here's some thoughts I came up while not sleeping one night. all together, now i lack the imagination to convince myself of the existence of any kind of god, but i am willing to consider there might be more than one realm of being - an earthly dimension where we, as moral, thinking flesh-creatures, are responsible for all the outcomes of our life, entities of blood and bone accountable to the moral and civil standards of our time, for how we treat ourselves and others - no one to blame or praise but ourselves for the course of our actions however we imagine the dream of it, this first dimension could be only a temporary flesh-life, just a phase we go through, both product and precursor of some communal existence, a collective consciousness of all living things, from stones in the field who grow and diminish through the passage of time, to the sizzle of lightning in a thunderstorm at night, to tiny creatures whose flesh-life is limited to minutes, to all the creatures of the forests and fields and jungles and seas, and, finally, to you and me the life most know, maybe only a small portion of the life-eternal unknown to all but the very few of our blood and gristle kind, the great masters, the root-finders, who follow the path that puts them in the flow of time and life never- end ing  Here's my final piece by Cornelia DeDona for this week, the title from her new book Boogey Fever. Boogey Fever I feel brash like a samoan crab my limbs splayed, tan skin pelted by fine sand. The air warm and humid, as I prepare for the adventure. Lavender Oakley's perched lizard like on the bridge of my nose, starting at the Mokulua; I race into the crush. I manage to escape where the eager jellyfish wait - to cling to ankles and thighs. Quickly now up to my chest, I press forward and sideways to watch for the swell. I listen to the pulse and pummel against the shoreline. Riding a locomotive over the crest of a wave thrust back to shore over and over again. Occasionally caught in a tunnel of water, I somersault with the board in a turbulent washer - spinning through past lives. It releases me plunging and bobbing into the present with sand dredged pores - old cavities filled. I take a deep breath and roll onto my stomach and paddle back out to savor another set. Until finally I return, eyes shining, wrinkled and blue, to collapse on that hot sand and straw mat.  I wrote this one in a moment of utter desperation last week. fini i have seen the future and it looks like the past fins fins everywhere fins on cars fins on houses fins on animals puppy dogs with ears trimmed like fins then starched to stand up straight like little puppy-sharks lurking in gray waters fins on kitties with pointy ears and tails sticking straight out back like a '57 Plymouth fins on squirrels chattering in trees fins on opossums that sneak over your fence at night to eat your pomegranates fins on birds, sparrows and pigeons and buzzards and hawks and eagles with little fin-tufts on their heads like jays and cardinals fins on horses and moose and bison, elephant, lizard, penguin and emu furry fins, feathered fins, scaly fins, fins of angora wool, and even peach fuzz fins even babies genetically modified to have pointy ears like Spock fins laid the side of their heads like werewolf ears just not so hairy all animals have fins but fish who adopt a more streamlined '62 Porsche look all of it, world government and the patterns of nature run by Finns from Finland the only music allowed on the radio from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. - "Finlandia" by Finnish composer Sibelius, the new patron saint of all music as dictated by the world government in Helsinki, capitol now not just of Finland, but everywhere... the final authority on everything i have seen the future and it is not good i have seen the future and it is too much like the past i have seen the future but that's all i have to say about it so now i'm finished  Next I have a couple of poems by Philip Larkin from his delightful little chapbook, High Windows, first published by faber and faber in 1974. Larkin was born in 1922 and grew up in Coventry. In 1955, he became Librarian of the Brymor Jones Library at the University of Hull, a position he held until his death in 1985. He received numerous awards for his poetry, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and the W. H. Smith Award. Annus Mirabilis Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) - Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles' first LP. Up till then there'd only been A sort of bargaining. A wrangle for a ring. A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything. Then all at once the quarrel sank: Everyone felt the same, And every life became A brilliant breaking of the bank, A quite unlosable game. So life was never better than in nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) - Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles' first LP. Cut Grass Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With Chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lane os Queen Anne's lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer's pace.  Here's a little closing essay i wrote just a couple of days ago on the politics of politics. about the politics of grumpity crapity old men was exchanging some political contentions this morning with a very conservative young woman who prefaced her remarks by saying she was part of the Reagan youth movement of the 1980s, a matter of evident pride with her though i find it strange that people might show such pride in not learning anything since they were children - as for myself, when i was the age she was in the 1980s i loudly and passionately proclaimed the truth of some really stupid ideas, but not just stupid ideas, a few pretty good ones as well, and at least my ideas, good and bad, were the ideas of my generation, not the preoccupations of a bunch of grumpity crapity old men who claimed to solve the world's problems over coffee every morning without ever demonstrating any personal knowledge of the difference between shit and shinola and now that i, myself, am among the legion of grumpity, crapity old men saving the world over coffee in the morning i at least have, despite a few remaining shit and shinola issues, the comfort of knowing i have lived now for 66 years in the wild and wicked gales that are the real world, the gales that over the years blew away most of my stupid ideas and reinforced my confidence in the good ones and i'm sorry my dear but the idea that i might be as clueless now as i was 40 years ago is not an outcome i would wish or boast about  So much for the Halloween. No big plans, may go to a costume party, dress up like a Republican, scare the crap out of everyone. But whatever happens on that dark night, we will be back next week. In the meantime - usual disclaimer: all the material in the blog remains the property of its creators, the exception being anything created exclusively by me which you can do with whatever you want as long as you spell my name right...allen itz. As producer and owner of this blog I so decree it. |
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