Like Long Dark Cats Stretching, or: Born Eighty-One Years Ago

 
Loud, please. More here. About him here. Look, please.
High Egoslavian Holy Day tomorrow. May is Egoslavia's birthdayiest.
Bleggalgaze: I need reminding once a year.

• How to settle down with dystopia. 
• Today marks the longest I've gone without changing template in this shitty blog's thirteen years. Yes, I track these things, though I did enlarge the font size of BLCKDGRD at top about two months ago, did you notice? No? I don't know whether that counts as changing the template or not. Fine metaphors on all accounts abound.
• Because I always must be worrying something. The worse worrying is worrying I'm not worrying about something. Apathy, I was once told, is a disease.
• As Perrin says, he'll either respond, or he won't.
• We are being rewired.
• This is directly related to writing my favorite posts on Sunday, the day I know is slowest here.
• What tomorrow will be.
• The Daily Tom. The best link daily on the Clusterfuck.
• Fresh haikus just out of the Berlin oven.
• The Ethics of Theory.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Book Abuse.
• A personal canon, continued.
• Chris Stamey. 
• Rest in Peace, Joanna Brouk, I'll make a cascade this coming week.

THE FLUFFY STUFF

May Swenson

I want the fluffy stuff to keep coming down.

I’m looking into the garden from the third floor.

I wait for it to settle on brownstone windowsills,

on fire escapes, their narrow iron stairs.

Thin-as-tissue bits fall and rise on spirals of air

like meandering moths, and never reach the ground.

At last, dead vines on the trellis in the sooty

backyard begin to whiten. There sprouts a mat

of white grass. Tips of pickets on the fence

get mittens. Chimney tops in the opposite block

have their hoods and copings furred. The fluffy

stuff catches in crotches of the old ailanthus

whose limbs, like long dark cats stretching

on their backs, expose white bellies.
                            

What began gauzy, lazy, scarce, falls willingly now.

I want it to race straight down, big, heavy, thick,

blind-white flakes rushing down so plentiful, so

opaque and dense that I can’t see through the curtains.