Where the Bottom, Finally, Is Again the Surface

• Steve, my uncle, a good guy, died yesterday, the day after his 86th birthday. I'm glad: it was time. I mention this not for sympathy but to praise hospice workers who are Kinder and Braver and Larger souls than I have been or am now and maybe someday won't be. Working on it.
• I also want a pit bull rescue, I don't see that happening anytime soon either.
• I doubt it's my last time in Republic, but it will be my last funeral trip to Republic.
• They say the other world is more beautiful.
• A dispatch from the birthplace of neoliberalism.
• Profoundly wrong take on Kansas. Read the last paragraph - the author thinks the end result is incidental, not the desired outcome.
• Of course it will get worse.
• Who will speak out for the poor billionaires?
• Bleggalgaze (not mine, don't worry).
• The heroic art of Agnes Martin.
• Narcissus.
• Diary of an April Unseen.
• Writers burning their manuscripts. Why, just this past weekend....
• Before BLCKDGRD there was Dogzilla (and Dogma-N). Dogzilla won the Expatriot Rotisserie League 1991 pennant. Landru finished second, and weekly, with the assistance of the SBOD, compiled stats and published the newsletter. Found in a box last night.

GORGEOUS SURFACES

Thomas Lux

They are, the surfaces, gorgeous: a master
pastry chef at work here, the dips and whorls,
the wrist-twist
squeezes of cream from the tube
to the tart, sweet bleak sugarwork, needlework
toward the perfect lace doily
where sit the bone-china teacups, a little maze
of meaning maybe in their arrangement
sneaky obliques, shadow
allusives all piling
atop one another. Textures succulent but famished,
banal, bereft. These surfaces,
these flickering patinas,
through which,
if you could drill, or hack,
or break a trapdoor latch, if you could penetrate
these surfaces' milky cataracts, you
would drop,
free-fall
like a hope chest full of lead
to nowhere, no place, a dry-wind, sour,
nada place,
and you would keep dropping,
tumbling, slow
motion, over and over for one day, six days, fourteen
decades, eleven centuries (a long time
falling to fill a zero) and in that time
not a leaf, no rain,
not a single duck, nor hearts, not one human, nor sleep,
nor grace, nor graves--falling
to where the bottom, finally, is again the surface,
which is gorgeous, of course,
which is glue, saw- and stone-dust,
which is blue-gray
ice, which is
the barely glinting grit
of abyss.