Saturday commute cxli: Red night and blue

   He was country-shy and hardly looked my way,

   just stepped onto the porch and talked to Dad

   about the weather, Shoeless Joe, the best

   type of knife to skin a catfish with.

   until Dad winked at me and went inside.

   We listened to the tree frogs and the crickets

   talking up a storm compared to us.

   You'd thought we'd been struck dumb, hardly a word

   until I said in an off-hand sort of way,

   "This sure would be a nice night for a walk."

   We followed the footpath down to Broad River Bridge,

   leaning out into the dark, upstream

   Eureka hummed, each pane of tinted glass

   blue and pretty as a town-church window.

   He didn't say a word, just took my hand.

Cy Twombly

Alessandro Twombly

1965

Untitled

Acrylic and watercolor

  on paper

Ron Rash

Eureka Mill

  My Grandfather

  Comes Calling

Hub City Writers Project

Spartanburg

1998©

Suppose it were Friday cxxiii: Sloppy spinnaker

 You know? Honestly, one doesn't
 wish to rub it in, but can any-
 one reasonably suppose that if
 Walt Whitman had witnessed this
 Republican foundering, he'd be
 lauding its captain? So let one
 put it another way. Can anyone
 remember a day, in the last few
 score, of the slightest coherent
 direction of this pirated ship?

  And this sort of counts, if a
  guess may be hazarded, where
  incoherency is so celebrated.
  This is a government devoted
  to our entertainment, by a
  somewhat nauseatingly diurnal
  reinvention of its identity.
  It totally defies discovery.

  A ritual flurry of thrilling
  orders, a blustering storm of
  tweets, a furtive resort to
  the television, and so to bed.

May it last

Who does not respond to Spring-
time's gentle breeze of Presi-
dential banishment, in carefree
marking of the moment as if Paul
Revere'd returned to claim a vic-
tory lap? With all the world de-
livered at last, to a universal
resolve to expel the beast from
town, what need have we to make
redundant entries in that data-
base, when merely to recall who
we are, can assure what will be?

Origins of Wednesday xlviii: Look away?

    What is that moment,

    as affectionate irri-

    tion with you little

    twerp dissolves into

    stupefied disbelief,

    that he will govern?

    Where is that place,

    the vanishing point?

  A gathering farce in the 
  Senate is, to the practice 
  of medicine and the dis-
  tribution of care, what 
  opium wars and the slave
  trade were, to their own, 
  absurd excuses: simple 
  rape, with unctuous hymns 
  of dogma. What is calculated 
  exploitation of the body, 
  for a violent concentration 
  of wealth in the fewest pos-
  sible hands? It's whoring. 

  This final vengeance on the
  outcome of our Civil War is
  an incinerating rampage of 
  racism and sexism, resurgent.
  It engulfs our very identity,
  with fanatical thoroughness.

  Look away?  

Henry Moore
Tube Shelter
Oil on canvas
Tate Gallery
1941

John Thomson
1778 - 1840
The Blasted Oak
  the remains of
  Torwood Forest,
  near Stirling
Oil on canvas
1815

Bruce Weber
River Phoenix
undated

Le Sept

Let's go ahead and be corny:

the whole schtick was master-

fully staged, of course — the 

courtyard of the Louvre, the 

Beethoven chorus from the 9th,

the youngest leader of the na-

tion since Bonaparte, not by a 

coup d’état. The clarifying wit 

of I.M. Pei’s “foyer” struck us 

as the capstone of the occasion; 

the transparent, universally re-

cognized monument to the Interna-

tional Style, suggesting an entry 

point all over again. None of it 

makes sense to Americans who voted 

for our little Donny Thump-Thump,

masturbating his way through his

great man fantasy of history; who 

mime his Thump, and lobotomize 

themselves for it at Fox, when

he telephones in another chant; 

they wall themselves off from ev-

erything having to do with border-

less humanity, to say nothing of 

a humanism reviled by their heret-

ic pastors. But if one wanted a 

quiet star to shame the starch out 

of Teresa May, and brush American 

impostorship aside, there he was, 

a creature of Europe with friends.

Make the day count? Who knows.

All one sees, is one renewing

wave, not cresting. Our newest,

bravest continent; the homeward 

shore of humanity.

The Daily Express

May 8, 2017©

Ivan Terestchenko

Tricouleur