Saturday commute cxxxv: Frontiers of pheromones

  No, no. This won't take long.

  But I'd like to see if I can

  get this straight. A Secret-

  ary of State entrusted state

  secrets via e-mail to an as-

  sistant living with the most

  infamously promiscuous troll

  of the internet in our time?

  And this, we are to suppose,

  passes the smell test of due

  care? Oh, that is good news,

  because I sensed it might be

  some sort of discouragement.

A boutonnière for casual Friday

  














  For those such as our friend
  Gérard, to whom a freedom of
  style comes naturally, obser-
  vance of Casual Friday tends
  less to try the imagination,
  than to transport it by ref-
  erences commemorating the oc-
  casion. When a Casual Friday
  falls upon the 2nd Friday be-
  fore the election of any fe-
  male President, he restores
  us to that endless night of 
  Strauss, when a trouser rôle
  is redistributed with a cer-
  tain poignancy of destiny.

  














  Our Trumpkins, while he's
  at it, adopt the same motif
  from a fundamentalist at-
  tachment to Le roman de la
  rose, that breviary of the
  aristocracy as Huizinga had
  it, signalling the waning
  of the Middle Ages to which
  they are so fondly attached.

  They do own a deity of love
  who locks the heart, bigly,
  but this is to mingle cross-
  ing and dressing by missing,
  once again, the whole point.

Sophie Koch

Octavian

Chicago Lyric Opera

2016

National Library of Wales

Manuscript plate

The goddess of love

  locks the lover's heart

14th C

Boulevardier

2016

Play at the Sound

   it really is difficult,

   exhausted as we may be,

   to believe we've watch-

   ed an election campaign

   based on the apparently

   irresistible delight in

   making it all shallower

   

   but we connived in this

   half-time extravaganza,

   so we need to go to the

   polls to make an end of
   it, and ready ourselves
   for another Presidency,
   hobbled by gerrymander-
   ed idiots in the House,
   America's weight again.

iv  m-ban

Enough with the faux revulsion already

   

 Will the long, neurotic soak
 by our media in Trump phobia
 be able to accept the voters'
 mandate to desist from driv-
 ing them mad with pettiness,
 or will Americans remain dé-
 luged in faux revulsion with
 each passing drop of a leaf?

 Awakening today, to CNN's a-
 ghast revelation that little
 Donny Thump-Thump challenges
 his commercial property tax-
 es, who should not instantly
 have called in Claude Rains?
 Any moment now the Post will
 pick it up, and denounce his
 lawyers for doing their job.

Which comes first, in assessments
we can't believe in: the high, or
the habit? It should be enough to
be right about Trump. Just sayin'.

  

If the term, pitchers' duel, doesn't scare you

             we can talk 

             for the next week 
             or so, as late as
             the 2nd of Novem-
             ber we'll be giv-
             en our last games
             of baseball for a
             while - something
             we can watch with
             just about anyone

Controlled blaze

    I wouldn't call

    on Speaker Ryan

    to execute this.

Tom Hayden

       Stay with me they say

       as if so constant the

       shore and sea weren't

       illuminated otherwise

       

Learning to survive the phony

       He never did impugn
       the perfection of a
       white T. One almost
       wishes he had tried.

       Something must have
       told our Brioni-was-
       ted snark, his very
       coterie would rebel.

       Shall we hazard the
       disclosure: they be-
       long with everyone,
       as much the white T?

       One rediscovers priv-
       ileged classlessness
       in the genius of the
       white T. Who'd quit?

       

   

Sampled fruit

The photographer who created
this unreasonably excellent
picture has presented it as
suggesting Sunday afternoon,
manner of Edward Hopper.

The dialogue between the mak-
ing and the depiction of vis-
ual art is present enough in
each of these artist's works,
to portray how familiarly we
associate with created image-
ry, as in this cottage space.

And his reference to another
artist is therefore clearly
one of consciousness as much
as of construction. In this
proposition, the photograph-
er raises the acts of poetry,
in which his dialogue with
the painter is consuming. 

We see it done in words more
often, as a scavenging assem-
blage of almost a parallel so-
ciety, implicit contributions
susceptible of such sampling. 

                         I have eaten

                         the plums

                         that were in

                         the icebox

                         and which

                         you were probably

                         saving 

                         for breakfast

                         Forgive me

                         they were delicious

                         so sweet

                         and so cold

William Carlos Williams
This is just to say
1962

Ivan Terestchenko
undated

Laurent
American veteran
October 5, 2010