You really can't say, I hadn't warned you, Martin

    It just had always seemed

    too obvious to me, Martin,

    that if we were to engage

    in other people's conduct,

    we'd only end up, resem-

    bling them.

We had been having, I do remember this, extremely strange weather

   It would not have

   been reasonable

   to have held any-

   one to account,

   even if one could

   have predicted it.

Suppose it were Friday lxxi: becoming the field ii

  And man, that noble insect, restless man

  Whose thoughts scale heaven in its mighty span,

  Pours forth his living soul in many a shade

  And taste runs riot in her every grade.

  While the low herd, mere savages subdued,

  With nought of feeling or of taste imbued

  Pass over sweetest scenes a careless eye

  As blank as midnight in its deepest dye;

  From these, and different far in rich degrees,

  Minds spring as various as the leaves of trees

  To follow taste and all her sweets explore

  And Edens make where deserts spread before.

John Clare

"I Am,"

  The Selected Poetry

  of John Clare

Jonathan Bate, editor

  The Midsummer Cushion

  Shadows of Taste [fragment]

circa 1830

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003©

They give you no points for a summer cold ii

The expedient of the semi-

permanent handkerchief, as-

sociated as much with hos-

pital protocols as it is

with Lord Tennyson and the

pickup games of goodguys &

badguys in the walled gar-

dens of youth, comes natur-

ally to mind when entertain-

ing a black-masked English

dog between his merciful

naps. But surely it must

have been for the symptoms

of the summer cold, if not

a passing plague, that this

hoary improvisation in the

breathable properties of lin-

en made its historic debut.

It is a curiosity to me, how

the mask's properties of con-

cealment and prophylaxis are

entirely lost, in their mig-

ration to the countenance of

a dog, and yet how well the

species carries a contrar-

ian message of candour and

conviviality with this device;

while, one's own experiments

in projecting these unmenacing

qualities tend to prove incon-

clusive at best. Yet the rid-

dle has the scale, one could

say, to match the reduced cap-

acities of a summer cold, as

having flickered through the

head of everyman at one time

or another, muggingly lying in

wait for the full-blown coach

and four of antibiotic relief.

They give you no points for a summer cold

They give a fellow no points

for writing about his summer

cold. Now, I know, having ut-

tered this complaint, one or

more of my colleagues, elo-

quent in discussing symptoms,

will run off a really peachy

report by eluding every dis-

agreable term and phrase, in

a nevertheless poignant way.

But is a summer cold that way,

or is it violent, unnerving,

desolating? I try to suppress

such questions about my own

summer cold, it seeming just

simply bad, cruel, ill-timed.

I could have opened a pleas-

ant Cuvée Louise last even-

ing, in the ordinary course

of celebrating the Supreme

Court's end of term. But the

fact of the matter is, they

left town two days too late.

I supped on a nicely crunchy

gazpacho instead, for which

the only evidence I was giv-

en of its passage across my

palate was the need to wash 

dishes. It took me most of

the evening, just to read a

final chapter of an anti-

fascist thriller of spot-

lessly generic predictabil-

ity; and if I couldn't zip

through a fantasy of pure

consolation, it can't have

been for dread of coming

to that end, but a symptom,

and one of the naughtier,

of an untoward summer cold.

Alan Furst

The Foreign Correspondent

Random House, 2006©

Reflections in suspense

I believe there are greater

human rights than matrimony,

which is after all a social

convention, revolting as it

may be to withhold it from

anyone. This condition of a

right as a human, not a so-

cial attribute, distinguish-

es it from a baseball bat, 

a law. And we do, continu-

ously, observe it is the

reality of human right, not

what we do with it, which

generates confusion, ambiv-
alence, and sometimes fear.
Beneath all that, there is 
only the brittleness of
tautology, for all to see:
the assertion that there is
no right, because there is
no discrimination, only god.

Thus, among the trust-

worthiest of human respon-

ses, one to another, em-

pathy impresses one as the

masterpiece of philosophy

as well as of marital tech-

nique. A great revolution

which we have been privi-

leged to witness, some to

advance, is in the break-

ing down of the anguish of

separation, under the per-

sistent, sublimely uninten-

ded press of catastrophes

of discrimination. A study

of feeling is irreversible.

Our eyes have seen it. And
we are sustained by those
who give away how they love,
this luminance in everyone.

   From time to time it seems her form and smile,

   sweet and angelic, grow less harsh toward me,

   the air of her fine face

   clears like the sky, her happy eyes grow brighter.

   These sighs, what are they doing with me now,

   that used to come from sorrow

   and once made very clear 

   the desperate, anguished nature of my life?

   Happens I turn my face in her direction

   to try to ease my heart,

   it seems that Love is there

   lending his aid and taking up my cause.

   Yet I don't think this war is going to end

   or any tranquil peace come soothe my heart:

   my passion burns the more

   the more I'm tempted by my hopefulness.

Francesco Petrarca

1304 - 1374

The Poetry of Petrarch

  Sonnet 149

David Young, translation

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004©

Your rolling river

     

      When Lyndon Johnson quit,
      the entire edifice of na-
      tional madness shook with
      one anxious question. Did
      this mean McCarthy or did
      it mean Kennedy?

      It meant more
      not less of
      Texas.

San Francisco Chanticleer
Portrait
  Shenandoah
op. cit.

Sourdough rises

From yeasts
borne on the
air.

Not that we'd
be making the
same mistake,
necessarily.

Somebody estim-
ated that the
devices, alone,
of our surveil-
lance state are
doing the work
of 700 million
specialists. 

And how many
times does that
count the mirror?

    A terrorist in his underwear,
    Shaving in the steam, wipes the bathroom mirror clearer.
    I see, while death is near, life is nearer.
    My shaven skin is softer than the air.



















Frederick Seidel
Nice Weather
  Beaudelaire
  [fragment]
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012©