Morning window study

                                      .. the odor

of mid-summer hanging in winter.

                       

  On January 16, 1989, the poet

  Philip Levine published a long-

  er version of an extraordinary

  poem he called, Perennials,

  than a reduction he issued two

  years later, in his own collec-

  tion, What Work Is. Scholars

  must surely be driven batty,

  in their quarrel over which 

  is the greater, the more auth-

  entic, the ultimate statement.

  Which voyage of Ishmael's was

  his true return to the sea, we

  might as well ask. Every visit

  proves the mystery of this po-

  em; this morning, just a frag-

  ment brings me to its presence.

Philip Levine

What Work Is

  Perennials

op. cit.

Photo credits unknown

Suppose it were Friday cxxi: No time for sleeping in

  Of all the courtesies extended
  Thursday by the Ninth Circuit,
  bestowing the decision midweek
  has had the effect of soothing
  our defenses no more than they
  should be, given the interest-
  ing challenges confronting us.

  No doubt there'll be a
  haberdasher to defend,
  a spokesman to reprim-
  and, a global pallete,
  pleading for coherency
  in the swirling, moody
  dabblings of dementia,
  enabled adventitiously
  by predictable cowards
  in control of Congress.

  Their plan is right on
  track. He's their can-
  ary. They'll go as far
  as he can, to mine us.
  
  

United States Court of Appeals

  for the Ninth Circuit

Order

  State of Washington; State of

  Minnesota v. Donald J. Trump,

  President, et al.

February 9, 2017

What is this place?

Friedland
Clifton
Canby

          Johnny, it's America!



















          

OK, so they do mean harm

    The Republican Senate just clawed 

    its way through the foulest slime

    of redneck bigotry to sell Justice

    for another orgy in our Treasury.

    And when they've ticked all their

    boxes of revenge against reality,

    they'll have only strengthened a

    force they cannot stop: what cor-

    ruption does to power, anywhere.

Fair warning

     America has a new Attorney

     General, the most infinite-

     ly inconceivable of all re-

     gressions. Now an occasion

     restores to us the gift we

     can not lose.

Carlo Scarpa

Querini Stampalia

Venice

Origins of Wednesday xliv: Entitlement reform

“If the U.S. does not win 

this case as it so obvi-

ously should, we can never 

have the security and safe-

ty to which we are entitled. 

Politics!”

These, categorically, are not entitle-

ments, anywhere in the time or space 

ever known by persons or nations. 

They are fetishes of demagogic illu-

sion which crop up when "soccer moms" 

can be identified for supporting ag-

gressive war, and when civil liberty, 

social justice, and the advancement 

of learning can be used to explain 

the pain of the uncomfortable as not 

the fault of the comfortable. This 

monstrous invention of the second

Bush government - that human life 

"entitles" one to pass unharmed 

through its gentle pastures - is 

now recited as an Apostle's Creed 

of sacrosanct nonsense entitling 

every excess of the degenerate 

state it sustains. 

We greet the face of Entitlement Re-

form in the Yemeni child who finally

arrived in New York this week, from

purgatory in Djibouti. Where is the

smug expectation of the bitter dilet-

tante of liberty, the rotten scowl 

of vigilance to deny it to humanity?

Give us good government of this world,

and let us be responsible for our soul.

President of the United States

Internet declaration

February 8, 2017

We've got him in the Ninth Circuit

The vomit isn't even dry

from his inaugural ora-

tion, and we've got him

in San Francisco on a

charge of cheating on a

contract in immigration.

This country promised

people it had "vetted"

from A to Z, a date of

entry here as refugees.

He sent his toadies out

to claim we'd be invad-

ed, if he were to give

advance notice of this

revolting evacuation of

our word. And now he's

going to hear what it

means, when words count.

Let's wax the skis.

Mobility

I think of this as a subject

for Charles Lamb, to whose es-

says from the 1820s I was com-

mended by my father, so that

as I encountered them under

scholastic compulsion, I was

ready to be unresisting. As

Elia, Lamb describes an uncle

who could have been a father,

and such men one knows, too.

.. and how he used to carry me on his back when I was a lame-footed boy - many a mile when I could not walk for pain; and how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was impatient, and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago  .. yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive again, and was as uneasy without him, as he must have been when the doctor took off his limb ..

Charles Lamb

Elia and The Last

  Essays of Elia

  Dream-Children

    A Reverie

Jonathan Bate

  editor

Oxford University Press, 1987©

op. cit.

Cup on a plinth

There are you, familiar, at times

overlooked, despised. Now, 

go back the way you came, down

the same old streets where you

grew to a name and a single face.

Close your eyes. You are on

a dark plain. The hot winds

breathe in and out. You're laughing!

You asked for a home, you crossed

the earth, you sat speechless,

you questioned the closed door,

'Are you there?' no one answered

because all the time it was you.

Philip Levine
 What Work Is
  Burned
  [fragment]
Alfred A. Knopf, 1991©


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Photo, Laurent