Had my one-week post-surgery exam yesterday morning and eyedoc is highly pleased and deeply impressed with his work on my eye and reassures me this nagging paper-cut stinging in the eye's corner closest to my nose will pass in a week or so though I keep telling him it gets worse each day, it's normal, don't you know, fine metaphors abound. I can resume normal physical activity to hike with L last night and tonight and disc Rockburn or Woodsboro Saturday and Ditto or Emmitsburg or Rockburn or Woodsboro or someplace new on Sunday. According to eyedoc my left eye was 20-190 before surgery, 20-30 post-surgery. The clusterfuck looks the same to me sighted as it did blind. Here's my repaired left eye, still an old used car with +200K miles and bald tires
When will Drump anoint himself American Pope (and steal the church's money), he already thinks his words infallible even when two of his consecutive sentences directly contradict each other. The above left eye is the last hexjeff for a while, maybe, perhaps, I hope so, no promises, I'm out of acrylic ink, out of gouache, out of watercolor blocks, time for a break. Deliberate timing - was hoping that eye-op would make reading easier, less squinty, less headachey, nope, grandpa glasses and grandpa strings for me, but I'm old. Might work, eye-op, re: reading more, probably not
Pete Shelley was born 71 years ago, my favorite Pete Shelley song below the grid, but in 1981 Maha Whateverthefuckherlastnamewas fired me from the Highs that is now a Ledos on Muncaster Mill Road in Derwood for playing this "catamate" (sic) song when she walked in to get something out of her office during my Friday 4pm to midnight shift
ONDINE
Timothy Donnelly
To speak freely, I could never land on anything worth talking about
but from the moment they shut me up, I’ve been full of things to say.
It’s not that the mind is tricking itself but that the mind itself is a trick
played on silence by the body. You might imagine a cool black pond
completely devoid of moonlight, no stand of white pine framing it
and an absence of the little ripples that pleat a pond’s still surface.
As for me, I can’t do it. I start stumbling only a few strokes in, incapable
of imagining what isn’t there without planting it there by mistake.
If this is a crime, at least its wake is victimless, but even I can see
it differs by degrees, and when speech is added to the mix, what isn’t
might be addressed as if it were, then all the sailors tuning in at sea
end up clinging to what they hear as fact, when it’s actually in error,
or worse, misleading by design. Still, I find it strange that the pond
was never intended to be an object of the mind’s perceptual activity
but a metaphor for the silence the body disturbs, although the more
I give it thought, the more it slides into the mind itself, silently and still
abiding in the body, neither adding to nor taking away, until the body
wants something it can’t quite reach, or needs what evanesces to stay,
and as its inner distance widens, deepens, I paddle across dark water
to the pond’s inky center, where wave by wave a new reality is speaking.
