How Strange They Arrive at All, Nights on Planet Earth

• Tomorrow is the Holiest Day of Egoslavia, so links today (friends have stirred) and then not again until the weekend at the earliest, though I'll add through the afternoon as good ones are found. Speaking of the Holiest Day of Egoslavia, the above is my favorite of many favorites of Planet photos of Fleabus.
• Between popular Democratic uprising and Fascist putsch.
• Game theory and the Ukraine debacle.
• Here's Frances' post on the legal problems of a friend. It was taken down for a few hours yesterday, amended slightly to please the friend's lawyer.
• The fundamental problem with US News college rankings.
• There are two kinds of novelists?
• Bleggalgazing note: it's quite a competition between a spambot my stat-program says is in Tel Aviv and a spambot in Novosibirsk to generate thousands of pings in the past 24 hours AND countless comments that make it through the squiggles meant to deter them. 
• It's gonna be weird when the late 90s are cool again.
• Mimesis and The Lego Movie.
• The Charles Pierce column you would expect on the William Kristol column you would expect.
• Mimesis.
• The Boy with Spyrograph Eyes, now on sale! Dave, the paypal link isn't working! (and it works on other sites for me).
• Lispector and Ruefle!
• Tu Fu watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake.

A LITTLE TOOTH

Thomas Lux

Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and
rue nothing. You did, you loved, your
feet are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.







NIGHTS ON PLANET EARTH

Campbell McGrath

Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).

—Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey

1

Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards,

click of pearls upon a polished nightstand

soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music

distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull

of the self and the soul in the darkness

chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence.

Deep is the water and long is the moonlight

inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink,

building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon.

Deep is the darkness and long is the night,

solid the water and liquid the light. How strange

that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth.

2

Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate,

a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars, a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,

a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color, laminar and fluid and electric,

a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost.

Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,

or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop,

or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can neither remember entirely nor completely forget,

barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,

the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot,

always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable.

3

In the night I will drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint.

In the night I will gossip with the clouds and grow strong.

In the night I will cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream.

In the night I will assemble my army of golden carpenter ants.

In the night I will walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust.

In the night I will cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices.

In the night I will gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar.

In the night I will become an infant before your flag.