Gravity of a Self-Consuming Self-Proliferating Blind

• Iggy is sixty-seven today. It's OK, I'm old too.
• Remember, the financial sector clusterfuck is a Democratic Party clusterfuck.
• Desperate or evil?
• Singing the praises of power.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday reads.

• Loggers Trail to Pine Knob Trail to Browning. Today's monologue.
• Map of the above.
• Maps.
• Poems on surveillance.
• He can be a science fiction writer if he wants to be.
• Which poet are you? Bogus but fun.
• Above found in Silliman's incredibly generous litlinks.
• Ceravolo, for those of you who do, for those of you like me who will try again until I get it.
• So, I made it to Season 1, Episode 15 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine before saying fuck that, looked at NetFlix, thought I'd try Breaking Bad since I've seen people rhapsodize about it being the best TV show ever, I made it to Season 2, Episode 6, and fuck that.

VANTAGE

Alan Shapiro

From where I watch, there are no highest leaves,
no leaves that don’t have over them more leaves
impeding what they open up and out for,

darkening downward as they feed on green
diminishments, as if dark, if it still
can darken, could be itself the light

the darker leaves beneath are hungry for.
From where I watch even the shade hungers
And is hungered after—all along the chain

past bark, root, leaf, ghost speck of leaf,
microbial scrapings, and beyond them, flakes
chipped off of flakes off of a now-

no-longer anything sucked dry, unsifted
and unsiftable into so fine a green
even the dark shines through. What’s hunger but

a hole to fill, gravity of a self-
consuming self-proliferating blind
and densely tangled maze of this from that,

from this, somewhere inside of which a cry
for mercy isn’t heard, or is, and the jaws shut,
and the very dirt becomes the dirt of it.