Wisteria, Extreme

The penultimate day of the birthdayiest month in Egoslavia. Pauline Oliveros is eighty-two today.

Saturday is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, I said at Thursday Night Pints, certainly the last Thursday Night Pints for the summer, probably the last forever though we promised ourselves at least one more. We've already lost D, rest in peace. K has offers in Ann Arbor and Palo Alto, will take one or the other, will be out of town much of the summer. L has grandchildren in Atlanta, stupidly lucrative house-flipper offers for her house in Arlington, will be out of town much of the summer. I'd take the Palo Alto offer, I said to K. I said to L, I'd take the stupidly lucrative money and buy a single floor condo near your grandchildren instead of living alone with two bad hips in a 1940s Cape Cod with three floors and narrow and steep stairs. I was agreeing with the choices they've already made. I can't imagine going to Atlanta for any reason, I can totally imagine going to Northern California, I'll have places to stay in either case.

That's the Thursday Night Pints bleggal pre-eulogy, eulogy, and post-eulogy. Combined with else and tomorrow's High Egoslavian Holy Day fine metaphors abound, or could or might or will.







UPDATE!

• I wasn't going to post links today but I may not post links tomorrow and these will go stale soon.
• The return of Fuck You Friday.
• Monster capitalism and the complicit state.
• Privatizing profits, socializing losses.
• On the urgent necessity of anti-imperialism.
• The anxieties of big data.
• Daniel Ellsberg on the odious John Kerry. This is true: on election day POTUS 2004 I went door to door in Harrisburg Pennsylvania canvassing votes of John Kerry.
• Those who own the goal posts.
• Silber sends a brief update. Please, if you can spar the coins in your pocket consider giving them to Arthur.
• Ten words used only in Irish English.
• Walter Benjamin, for those of you who do.
• On location: Place and placelessness; conflicting histories and transmuted genre; mythologized frontiers and one notion of “the West” blurring into a socio-historic another, somewhere just beyond the usual reach of cinematic allegory and metaphor...
• Charles Simic remembers Russell Edson (whose poetry I barely know) and Bill Knott (whose poetry I love).
• The legacy of William Meredith, who I used to read but don't think about any more (which says more about me than the poetry of William Meredith).

EXTREME WISTERIA

Lucie Brock-Broido

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.

                                                                              The hydrangea

Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself.

Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.

A throat to come home to, tupelo.

                                                Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.

Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.

Wistful, woke most every afternoon

                                In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.

                                                Beautiful cage, asylum in.

Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not

                                 Have been there.

So few wild raspberries, they were countable,

                                 Triaged out by hand.

Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others,

                                 Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence.

Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves

                                 Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.

High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles,

                                                                              Scarlet fevers;

Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home.

Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations

Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths.

Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,

In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such.

                                                                                          Wisteria, extreme.

There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

IF A GARDEN OF NUMBERS

Cole Swensen

If a garden is the world counted

                                                           and found analogue in nature

One does not become two by ever ending

                                                                           so the stairs must be uneven in number

and not exceed

thirteen without a pause

of two paces’ width, which

                                                 for instance, the golden section

                            mitigates between abandon

and an orchestra just behind those trees,

gradations of green that take a stethoscope: we risk:

Length over width

                                  to make the horizon run straight

equals

            to make the pond an oval:

                                                            Width

                                                            over length minus the width

                              in which descending circles curl

into animals exact as a remainder.

                              Which means excess. The meaning of the real

always exceeds that of the ideal, said someone.

                                                                                      He was speaking of Vaux-le-Vicomte,

but it’s equally true of parking, or hunting, or wishing you could take it back. He

                              who is Allen Weiss, actually said, “The meaning

of a plastic or pictorial construct always surpasses the ideal meaning of that work.”

Which is something else entirely. Said

the axonometric

divided by

the anamorphic.

                               There is nothing that controls our thoughts

more than what we think we see,

which we label “we.”