At Last We Decoded the Terminal Message Only to Find the Pattern We Had Expected Was False

   
We're driving to Ohio middle of week after next, two cars on the way out both so Planet has a car there and we can pack all her stuff, one car bringing Earthgirl and me back. I'll be driving alone on the way there, I like the time alone and I don't begrudge Earthgirl wanting the hours with her daughter, so I spent last night building the playlist on the iPod of all the music I won't be allowed to play on the return drive home. These are for the long quiet beautiful middle third of the drive Cumberland to Waynesburg out, Waynesburg to Cumberland back (stretched on either side, from Hancock east of Cumberland to Washington north of Waynesburg), have some the songs for a dead Blog Days of Summer Saturday.

• Quite possibly the lamest Obama stunt ever since the last until the next.
• Deitungshoheit.
• Various forms of radicalism.
• Jim's Hawaiian adventure continued.
• Clouds.
• MLS = WWE.
• As I look at The Guardian's soccer page just before typing this sentence there is no mention of Dempsey's transfer. Interpret as you please.
• I actually think that if I type LOOK! Glaxo Babies! LISTEN!  people go, Hey! Glaxo Babies? Hey! and will click through.
• What conceptual poetry lacks, what its got.
• The art of the phony.
• Anarchic intentions.
• Betting on book prize winners.
• Obscure Sound's Best of July.
• RIP Fernando Grillo, listen to three hours of his music.

THE BIG BAD

David Orr

At last we decoded the terminal message,

Only to find the pattern we had expected

Was false — a false trail of false bread crumbs

Designed to leave pitfalls undetected.

We found a new pattern. We found a hand

Moving pieces we had thought were only

Part of  the board, and shifting them to vantage points

We had ignored. We rewrote the battle plan

And reconfigured the satellite array

To show our progress from the very beginning.

The fault should be traceable — and hence correctable — 

And once we found it, we’d be winning.

We found a new pattern. We followed its track

To a forest beside an abandoned tunnel

Diving wide as a boxcar into the rock.

A stale breeze blew over rusting shovels

And all of our instruments confirmed a hit.

We set a perimeter. We sent in a scout.

From the interior, nothing looked back at us.

No tracks indicated a force had come out.

But we had a pattern. At dawn, we dispatched

A team of our best, our trackers and stone killers,

To see if  the signals were finally a match

And if so, to counterattack. And now we wait.

And now we wait. The tunnel gives nothing back.

The trees are revealing the first signs of gold

But the air is unmoving. The air is still.

It is quiet here, and getting cold.