hopes dance best on bald men's hair

• I've not tried mead though I see it in MOMs, shelves of it, never thought more about mead until I needed to watch a Bud Light commercial before I could post the youtube below last night.
• A kind and benevolent king walks into his castle mess and orders free Bud Light for all his guests, but one Resistance member asks for mead, autumnal mead, mead the new Volvo, the mead-drinker placed in the stocks, Dilly Dilly.
• Earthgirl away painting, I did a long loop by myself at Little Bennett, joined for two miles by

• Chance. He adopted me in the high meadow of This or That Trail, walked with me two miles to where his owner picked him up, Chance's orange collar sharpied with phone number.
• Chance seemed a good guy, well-fed and happy, the owner, what do I know, I could put words in his brain and call it a short story, but all unhappy families....
• E.E. Cummings born 128 years ago today, more poems here.
• While I'm delighted I'm not nagged by moral imperative to post this song as once I'd be, I'm also not embarrassed to post the obvious and never will be:

[as freedom is a breakfastfood]

E.E. Cummings

as freedom is a breakfastfood

or truth can live with right and wrong

or molehills are from mountains made

—long enough and just so long

will being pay the rent of seem

and genius please the talentgang

and water most encourage flame

  

as hatracks into peachtrees grow

or hopes dance best on bald men’s hair

and every finger is a toe

and any courage is a fear

—long enough and just so long

will the impure think all things pure

and hornets wail by children stung

  

or as the seeing are the blind

and robins never welcome spring

nor flatfolk prove their world is round

nor dingsters die at break of dong

and common’s rare and millstones float

—long enough and just so long

tomorrow will not be too late

  

worms are the words but joy’s the voice

down shall go which and up come who

breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs

deeds cannot dream what dreams can do

—time is a tree(this life one leaf)

but love is the sky and i am for you

just so long and long enough

To Embellish That as Though Life Were a Party

• I only write about what I always write about and anything spun of worth spins from there.
• Copying and pasting from Neverote blows.
• Reading Murnane again, Barley Patch, the only novelist I seem currently capable of reading, when I try someone else I find myself three forgotten pages later thinking of Murnane.
• Murnane says over and over in every one of his fictions he learned early as a child he hasn't the imagination as imagination is imagined in authors who claim to know what their characters think.
• I know my own tenets make this inevitable, and I don't know, will never know, if Murnane read Ashbery and visa versa, but they are synoptic gospels re: my coding.
• I forget how I got to The Specials Do the Dog between the previous sentence and this sentence but it pleases me I'm learning to not worry why.

• Trump and the end of smugness.
• The blindspot revisited.
• The path to neoliberal fascism.
• Broken spearhead.
• The instability of modernity.
• Random barking Friday.
• On Paul Simon, who is 77 today.
• A poem and its poetics.

PUNISHING THE MYTH

John Ashbery

At first it came easily, with the knowledge of the shadow line
Picking its way through various landscapes before coming
To stand far from you, to bless you incidentally
In sorting out what was best for it, and most suitable,
                  
Like snow having second thoughts and coming back
To be wary about this, to embellish that, as though life were a party
At which work got done. So we wiggled in our separate positions
And stayed in them for a time. After something has passed
                
You begin to see yourself as you would look to yourself on a stage,
Appearing to someone. But to whom? Ah, that’s just it,
To have the manners, and the look that comes from having a secret
Isn’t enough. But that “not enough” isn’t to be worn like a livery,
                    
To be briefly noticed, yet among whom should it be seen? I haven’t
Thought about these things in years; that’s my luck.
In time even the rocks will grow. And if you have curled and dandled
Your innocence once too often, what attitude isn’t then really yours?

Dogs Cannot Write

• Reminder: everything is a work.
• Seven theses for the Socialist Left.
• It's already here.
• The answer is NO, he types into his self-incriminating blogging platform.
• Shameless opportunism. I have a vague memory of seeing that Coen Brothers movie, which considering I've seen at most two movies a year since 1977 (people can vouch) probably says more about me than the movie.
• I haven't talked about my eyes lately, the RX that turns my eyes redder than a stoner still working, my eyes why I think about movies at all, as in, what when I can't read, as in see the typed words, not not comprehend what my eyes still can scan?
• Remember that article that said unless we overthrow Exxon by Thursday we'll die by Saturday?

• When Borth Nethesda offers beachfront properties.
• I thought to say, either they're complicit and stupid or complicit and smart, then lamely said, I don't get it to a Hillaryite Colleague both proud and proudly offended to be called a mob.
• Reminder: everything is a work.
• He is a Marxist.
• Reminder: everybody is they.
• Fleabus, best cat ever.
• I did see Holder's kick, hear Clinton's jab, the Atlantic Ocean, coming to Poolesville.
• UPDATE! No one will ever accuse me of being a pioneer in rapid, mobile autopsies. I hope.
• Life in the Either/And-ocene v Death to the Either/Or-ocene is not a wash.

THE DOG STOLTZ

August Kleinzahler

The dog Stoltz pushed his paw pads into my neck,

the warm, beaten leather deep under my chin,

and let slip the one paw to up near my mouth

with all the filth of the many blocks we trod,

together trod, a well-moistened, adenoidal sound,

part sigh and part growl, coming out of him,

transported, he seemed, in a slow-motion delirium

as I tickled his chest and behind his ear

when he just then told me he’d tear out my throat,

looked in my eye and smiled, best as a dog can,

then turned ruminative and spoke once more:

—I simply have to knock off that essay on Sassoon.

This would have been Sassoon the war poet, understand.

Dogs cannot write. My mother told me this.

As for his talk, well, I took no special notice.

His love of the war poets was well known.

Stoltz would have been part bull and something else.

Two friends walked by just then, handily as these things go,

and inquired of us sitting down there on the stoop,

not even, a doorway merely, along a busy street,

how went the day and what pursuits was I attending;

but what interested the two of them most

were the tergiversations of the dog Stoltz,

first beast, then scholar, then abject and adored.

(Say, who among us does not care to be undressed?)

He was not really my dog, you see, and of this made note,

but were glad as well at my having a new dog in my life.

It was a busy stretch of pavement, Amsterdam maybe,

or Broadway, or farther down just south of Chelsea.

I can tell you it was the West Side, of that I’m certain,

and it was mild, spring-like, a few drops in the air.

The friends passed along and the dog Stoltz slept.

He was not my dog, you know. He simply followed me out

of what can only have been a very fine home,

such were his graces, his recondite tastes.

But he was a killer too, and rather smelled.

I cannot accommodate another animal now, please understand.

I am between places. I will yearn for Stoltz, but no.

as i think about rolling up the dogends

• In 2040 I would have been 81, Earthgirl too, Planet 47.
• Imagine the climate science still in peer review.
• The truest thing Trump admin's said is fuck it, planet is cooked, we need kill planet for all but the fuckiest of us in bunkered Micronesian Islands, to finish bunkers lavishly enough we need poison the planet faster.
• The people who mocked our Cassandra-ing a decade ago (remember the tag here Canary, Weathervane, Cassandra, Fool?) now fools and Cassandra too, say...
• Have you tried the Drive the Speed Limit Game, even on your 25 Mile Per Hour narrow windy neighborhood street? You should!
• We are being reprogrammed, I've told you three times,
• killing be casual (sic) by 2025. 
• This guy born 78 years ago today, and if I don't want to hear Beatles songs ever again (except for George's two off *Yellow Submarine*) I still listen to John solo and need note his life.

PRATHEORYCTICE

Tom Raworth

as i think of rolling up the dogends
looking for papers i see this terrible thing
thought of as a better life
sometimes i wonder
what is introspection
red white and blue
or through mud and blood
to the green fields beyond
which were the colors on a tie

Swatch of Meadow

• We hiked Sky Meadows again, all new trails this time, the goats Earthgirl wanted to paint gone from the fields on the trails we'd have taken to get there - I asked at the gate, was happy to hear, I wanted something new.
• Gray days are best days, sunny days wash colors.
• Meadows, I love them, I don't think green tunnel until I'm not tubed in one, true, and meadows.
• We plan to yellow map the park, hike every foot of every trail, next time Lost Mountain. 
• Someplace new! from yesterday:

• Virginia is beautiful, often, getting to and from the beautiful sucks (and would suck more w a 2nd bridge, motherficker).
• (I don't know that he does, the motherficker, want a 2nd bridge, but I, it was there, and I made myself laugh.)
• This self-imposed requirement I must digest Battle of Kavanaugh in the amino acids of Barack Obama and All Motherfucking Professional Democrats I don't hereby abdicate though I do absolve myself needing to weave all the re-paraphrased shit strands in this case....
• Flancy Noreen banners hang from high-risers in Bethesda.
• I was thinking about Thursday Night Pints this past Thursday Without Pints, D said, years ago, Thursday Night Pints years ago, games over, Citizens United, L said, no, Bush-Gore.

• I. Love. Meadows.
• The Meadow.
• 66 out, 340 to 270 back, easier, longer, prettier, policier.
• Permitted a Meadow.
• Local apples suck this year, local apple vendors tell me, give me product, their word is true, even the one with the Corey Stewart banner in his parking lot.
• UPDATE! Future sucks sooner!
• Cabin. 
• Bleggalgaze - I'd like to take credit for the decline in pings (less clusterfuck, more me, for instance, the deliberate posting of favorite posts on slowest days) (and thank you you who still visit), but the noisier the world the less the world comes here (and not just here, perhaps at your joint too, certainly at other Blegsylvanian joints, to read, or not read, there).
• The top photo bigger at the relocated other place.

• What's wrong with what Liberals say is wrong with the world?
• UPDATE! A summing up post-Kavanaugh (though I am, of course, more cynical about the Democrats' role, but....)
• UPDATE! A friend at work on Friday, angry, said, it can't get worse, can it, and I said, dude.
• True.
• The Autocracy App.
• On motherfucking Democrats.
• Resisting the Juristocracy.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• On professional poetry.
• UPDATE! Poetry, trauma, and radical exposure.
• How many poets does it take to screw in a light bulb?
• UPDATE! A good news bleggalgaze from Mr Alarum!

FIVE LANDSCAPES

Cole Swensen

One    

 

Green moves through the tops of trees and grows

lighter greens as it recedes, each of which includes a grey, and among the

greys, or beyond them, waning finely into white, there is one white spot,

absolute; it could be an egret or perhaps a crane at the edge of the water

where it meets a strip of sand.

Two 
     

There is a single, almost dazzling white spot of a white house out loud

against the fields, and the forest in lines

receding, rises,

and then planes. Color,

 

in pieces or entire; its presence

veneers over want; in all its moving parts, it could be something else

 

half-hidden by trees. Conservatory, gloriette, gazebo, or bandshell,

a door ajar on the top floor.

Three   

            

The trees are half air. They fissure the sky; you could count the leaves, pare

time

                              defined as that which,

                              no matter how barely, exceeds

                              what the eye could grasp in a glance;

intricate woods opening out before a body of water edged

with a swatch of meadow where someone has hung a bright white sheet

out in the sun to dry.

 

 

Four    

   

A white bird in a green forest is a danger to itself. Stands out. Shines. Builds

up inside. Like it’s dangerous to cry while driving or to talk to strangers or to

stare at the sun and a thousand other things

                                                                                   we’ve always heard

people who wear white see better at night, though they gradually lose this

trait as they age.

 

Five    

   

The air across the valley is slightly hazy though thinning though patches

remain between the groves of trees that edge a clearing in which stands a

single house. A child in a white t-shirt has just walked out of the house and

is turning to walk down to the lake.

Born Seventy Years Ago Today

More songs here.

The traditional Glenn Branca birthday post:

Glenn Branca born 70 years ago today. I play his descendants more than him here (no Branca no Swans, for instance, no Sonic Youth), will be sure to fix the ratio in future.

Then I forget, keep playing more of his descendants. Will try again.

Twelve hours of Branca.