Saturday commute lxxvi: the blue pants solution

  

    Is any Saturday ever wholly 

    lost, do you suppose, which 

    will allow a fellow to go a-

    bout in blue pants?

              

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria

               And from then

               on, you know,

               well ..

Qu'est-ce qu'un cendrier ii

Process
of a red stripe through much whiplash
of environmental sweepstakes misinterprets
slabs as they come forward. A
footprint

 directs traffic in the  center
 of flat crocus plaza as  the storm
 incurves on this new  situation. Why
 are there developments?
 A transparent shovel  paves, "they" say,
 residual elastic fetters
 pictures of moments
 brought under the sand

John Ashbery

Self-Portrait in

  A Convex Mirror

    Sand Pail

Viking Press, 1975

  Pulitzer Prize

  National Book Award

  National Book Critics

    Circle Award

Penguin, 1976©

iii  Mariano Ontanon

John Julius Norwich

Trying to Please

op. cit.

Vieux Télégraphe 2008

ashtray 1925, photo Laurent

Qu'est-ce qu'un cendrier

  
  On a stack of bedside
  reading, likely to be
  acknowledged sometime
  here, I laid a wish-
  bone I had promised a
  man to keep for him,
  in a vessel now obso-
  lete in this house, a
  shining ashtray from
  dinners drawn from an
  urban cocotte I loved.

Ian McEwan
Sweet Tooth
Jonathan Cape, 2012©

Peter J. Conradi
A Very English Hero
  The Making of 
  Frank Thompson
Bloomsbury, 2012©

Baccarat photo, Laurent

Who's your deal with, mister ?

        What is history,

        but a fable, 

        agreed upon?

Napoleon Bonaparte

1769-1821

Emmanuel de las Casas

Memorial of St. Helena

1823

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays

  History
    citing Bonaparte

1841

The Annotated Emerson

David Mikics, editor

Belknap Press

Harvard University Press, 2012©

Liam Hickey

"Whose single glance .."

   Perhaps causality was a
   way of uniting god with
   laughter?

But supposing I had chosen to march on you
Instead of on such a star - what then?
Instead of this incubus of infinite duration,
I mean to say, whose single glance
Brings loving to its knees?

Yes, wherever the ant-hills empty
Swarm the fecund associations, crossing
And recrossing the sky-pathways of sleep.
We labor only to be relatively
Sincere as ants perhaps are sincere.
Yet always the absolute vision must keep
The healthy lodestar of its stake in love.

You'll see somewhere always the crystal body
Transparent, held high against the light
Blaze like a diamond in the deep.
How can a love of life be ever indiscreet
For even in that far dispersing city today
Ants must turn over in their sleep.

Lawrence Durrell

Selected Poems

Peter Porter, editor

Solange 

   [extracts]

op. cit.