Getting close

  

  I'm remembering a campaign
  in which energy received a
  word or two, but it wasn't
  until the President visit-
  ed Florida last week, that
  someone said, sea levels -

                   The cutting-room floor

                   is covered with bladder-wrack

                   the sea wind's film score.

Paul Muldoon

Horse Latitudes

  90 Instant Messages

  to Tom Moore

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006©

Suppose it were Friday cxviii: Just enough for clapping

The Crown is catching up. The Times reported yesterday that dead persons convicted of crimes invented by British sodomy statutes are to be pardoned. Not sure what this means for Maurice or the greatest operas in the English language, but here's hoping their discretion keeps a seat apart for Oscar Wilde.

E.M. Forster and
  Benjamin Britten
Aldeburgh

Right ascending: Hillary Clinton in Las Vegas

Now one can anticipate enormous
animation in post mortems of last
night's debate in Las Vegas, as 
further revealing that unbridled
unfitness of Donald Trump for gov-
ernment in a free society. And no
denial of this need be considered.

But I think historians will turn
to Hillary Clinton's presentation
of herself, on that stage, as the
turning point, indeed the bridal
turning point, in her acceptance
of political responsibility. The
departure from her veiled past
may have been occasioned by the
imminence of her selection, and
it may have been enabled by the
staggering haplessness of her 
nemesis. But it was a shift of
momentous revelation, not forti-
fying so much as introducing a
credibility in relation to that
office, which is incontestable.

I have never heard so untram-
meled, uncribbed, uncrabbed a
defense of unconditional free-
dom of reproductive choice in
the many years since I read 
the words, Roe v. Wade in the
newspaper on the day of its
publication. Splendid it was.
Unexpected, unimagined clari-
ty, yielding no ground to the
prospect of working together
with extraneous authorities,
government only first among
them, to trifle with a right.

No professions of its rar-
ity, no confessions of its
temerity, no concession to
its disparity with dogma.
This was a right embodied.

Here was the unveiling, what
the Greeks call the anakalyp-
teria, of the female being as
human policy, and who could
not exult to see it done be-
fore that gender's foulest de-
tractor ever to be exposed to
light, his intimidations quar-
tering him on prime time TV.

And we have come too far

                      to have that turned back

                      now. And, indeed, he said

                      women should be punished,

                      that there should be some

                      form of punishment for wo-

                      men who obtain abortions.

                      And I could just not be

                      more opposed to that kind

                      of thinking.

This is the diction of a

person prepared to assume

office, not of someone ask-

ing to be given it. Possib-

ly, it is structured by im-

minence, but what lasts is

its resolution. Even deeper,

however, is the genius in

this argument, to turn the
intolerably widely tolerated

Trumpian complaint of dir-

tiness in womanhood, of mat-

ter out of place, as the po-

et and classicist Anne Car-

son has it, against the in-

vasions of retrograde con-

tempt for which he stands, 
in public and in private.
Nasty woman, his soliloquy
meant for the camera, is
engraved now on the escut-
cheon of Republicanism.

The long collusion in Hil-
lary Clinton's career, of
the public to conceal the
private, fell away on that
stage. Was it the power in
the right that brought such
candor to its claim, or the
freedom to declare it as de-
light in being born to it?























Anne Carson
Men in the Off Hours
  Dirt and Desire:
  Essay on the Phenomen-
  ology of Female Pollution
  in Antiquity
Random House, 2000©


Edgar Dégas
Self portrait as a
  young man
1855

Saul Leiter
Rémy
1950

Origins of Wednesday xli: Appointment in Las Vegas

Oh, no, this will be good.

Ignoring the incongruity,

of our evening entertain-

ment's having anything to

do with the Presidency of

the United States, and con-

sidering only the perform-

ers arrayed to vindicate

the setting's remorseless

renown, we observe their

embodiment of just about

everything the other re-

viles. Unhappily, for the

one who put his crotch in

play, his taste is outnum-

bered. And it is that mis-

calculation which this e-

vent will anatomize, be-

neath the gauzy chatter,

ostensibly, of policy.

Who is prepared to wait

too long, to hear 50 years

of enduring sexist condes-

cension frame the response

long gathering at its core,

I don't think I caught your

name. For, say what one may

like for history being made,

the setting for settling that

score could not be more per-

fected, than to place these

two in the downmarket capital

of the casino world, to bring

that house crashing down. Who

is prepared to wait to watch,

the johnny-one-note simpleton

mantra of standing strong,

shredded, by a shrug of self-

assurance?

Have we seen a greater cor-

relation in any occasion, be-

tween motive and opportunity,

than the gift of this one i-

deal opponent of gender equal-

ity, a paragon of shallowness, 

indiscipline, inconstancy and

incontinence, to satisfy the

continuously nurtured ambition

of a soul oblivious to distrac-

tion from that single goal? No

wonder, he stops at nothing to

trivialize that contest, he ex-

pects too painfully to lose.

Finally, the politics of the

occasion no longer elude us.

Finally, events have focused

the issue, and its parts have

been cast. Denial and belief

have never been more readied.

Shall we gather at the river?

Are we missing the whole thing

Progressives, with whom we all 
fashionably identify, are lick-
ing their unsavory chops at the
prospect of a humiliation of a
large number of American people.

They, in turn, appear ecstatic
in exposure at last, as derelict
of hope, ever of becoming free.
Or was I describing one people,
all over again?

Is it the unendurably Verdun-
like monotony of the present
campaign that surpasses even
our awe at the inadequacy of
its generals, or is the land
simply exhibiting its fissures
again as intractably unbridge-
able? Neither one, I think.

We note a failure of referral
to our abiding resources. In
these last weeks of our con-
finement, resort to the land
as the compass that it is, is
likely to be the path of pop-
ular thinking; again, with
gratitude to a heterodox lan-
guage, for its versatile eye.

               Pitched high above the shallows of the sea

               lone bells in gritty belfries do not ring

               but coil a far and inward echoing

               out of the air that thrums. Enduringly,

               fuchsia-hedges fend between cliff and sky;

               brown stumps of headstones tamp into the ling

               the ruined and the ruinously strong.

               Platonic England grasps its tenantry

               where wild-eyed poppies raddle tawny farms

               and wild swans root in lily-clouded lakes.

               Vulnerable to each other the twin forms

               of sleep and waking touch the man who wakes

               to sudden light, who thinks that this becalms

               even the phantoms of untold mistakes.

Geoffrey Hill

Selected Poems

  Loss and Gain

Yale University Press, 2006©