Freshman numerals

I don't know who this is

but I know what he means.

I assimilated that char-

acter of life from those

who went through it, who

lent scope and shape, to

a degree, to my own time.

I don't know who this is

but I know what he means.

Not through rhetoric but

through experience, some

spontaneous recognitions

affix themselves through

him to my understandings.

I don't know who this is

but I know what he means.

Not through rhetoric and

experience except in the

present in America, with

its harshnesses gathered

through time as if those

freshman numerals belong

to a jacket gone missing.

I don't know who this is

but I know what he means.

He means to sharpen vow-

els as consonants, fork-

ing us himself with pon-

iards of thrilling male-

volence, a jackboot mor-

on to soothe indignation

and deny reconciliations.

Not that this means he's

not an inexhaustibly use-

ful fool in his own sabo-

tage. Just as Republican

sages planned to exploit

his frailties, they show-

ed themselves as darken-

ing their own tidy name.

Oh, my. The scheme is up

in smoke; their embraces

of each other nullify it.

Geoff Brown

Worker in a tire shop

Nashville

undated

Achieving Thursday: learning from pictures

This excellent photograph, said by

our internet sources to come down

to us from the many-rivered vicinity

of Richmond, Virginia in the 1950s,

documents the adjustment in disposi-

tions we associate with a departure.

There has been a change, which will

play itself out through layers of

revision of this palpable bond, we

might not expect to see visibly ex-

panded, but we see its consequence.

To take a moment to take it in, has 

been to learn to govern projection 

of the self upon the data received,

but also to resolve to discover it.

It is the practice of citizenship,

whose mastery urges itself upon us

as an elementary discrimination now,

between sentiment and plain evidence.

Origins of Wednesday L: Look away? ii

         The Secession war? Nay, let me call it the Union war.

         Though whatever call'd, it is even yet too near us -

         too vast and too closely overshadowing - its branches

         unform'd yet, (but certain,) shooting far into the fu-

         ture - and the most indicative and mightiest of them

         yet ungrown. A great literature will yet arise out of

         the era of those four years, those scenes - era com-

         pressing centuries of native passion, first-class pic-

         tures, tempests of life and death - an inexhaustible

         mine for the histories, drama, romance, and even phil-

         osophy, of peoples to come - indeed the verteber of

         poetry and art, (of personal character too,) for all

         future America - far more grand, in my opinion, to the

         hands capable of it, than Homer's siege of Troy, or 

         the French wars to Shakespeare.

        

 But I must leave these speculations,

 and come to the theme I have assign'd

 myself to. Of the actual murder of

 President Lincoln, though so much has 

 been written, probably the facts are 

 indefinite in most persons' minds ..

Walt Whitman

Complete Poetry

  and Collected Prose

    Democratric Vistas

      Collect

1867

Justin Kaplan

  editor

The Library of America, 1982©

David Cole

The Sessions Threat

  More Dangerous than Trump

The New York Review of Books

May 23, 2017©

J.D. Crowe, drawing

2016