The Inexact Praise of the Easy Graces

I'm in the clean-up stage of grippe. Though it signals recovery, it's the worst part of the bug. For all the angry moods and vile moods I claim, there is nothing that fuels a self-pitying mood like day five of a bug. Everything, from mucus to work to world has settled in my lungs and I need to cough it out and know I won't.

I wasn't going to post today, but perspective must be gained and notice need be made. RIP, Joe Bageant. I got to Bageant late - I was a demstooge, a .06% less-shitty percenter up to and through the 2008 elections. The promises I made to mine before my apostasy will be honored, but Bageant helped me confront and, in my small ways, begin changing the terms of my complicity.

• Bageant.
• As has Arthur Silber. Throw him some coin, please.
• We're Number One!
• Rinse and repeat.
• Sandbagging.
• Complexity.
• Palladion.
• Our many devious enemies.
• UPDATE! Immaculate destruction.
• Koch.
• Economics as cultural warfare.
• On corporate and academic institutions.
• Dead skunk.
• unflappable.
• Metro turned 35 yesterday.
• Is David Bowie dying?
• Ravonettes cover Stone Roses.
• Hermetic. 
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.

QUARANTINE

Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
    of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
     He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
    Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
     There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
      Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.