I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last

• Earthgirl bought the indoor cats a battery-driven dual lazer-beam distraction
• Now that Nap an indoor half-the-time cat 
• daily indoor-only cat ladder match's ordered results fucked 
• (and they won't shut up about it)
• battery-driven dual lazer-beam distraction for cats a blessing
• Olive photo by Planet, giftmas day's best gift

 

• Valuable duh: thread.
• How much of the internet is fake?
• The life and death business of being a dog-walker.
• The third person I've seen in last year to yap about Fanny Howe, good think I have access to a university library's stacks and interlibrary loan service.
• frammenti.
• Book design in contemporary poetry.
• Gaddis (whose birthday is day after tomorrow): too much plasticity.
• I opened expanded both cemetary blogrolls on a whim, all the dead who I forget.
• At the other place.
• Charles Olson, who I do not hear like once I listened, me, not him, born 108 years ago today.
• I do like this post's title sentence's dual meaning on *last.*
• VITAL REMINDER! >

MAXIMUS, TO HIMSELF

CHARLES OLSON

I have had to learn the simplest things

last. Which made for difficulties.

Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross   

a wet deck.

               The sea was not, finally, my trade.

But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged

from that which was most familiar. Was delayed,

and not content with the man’s argument

that such postponement   

is now the nature of

obedience,

               that we are all late

               in a slow time,

               that we grow up many

               And the single   

               is not easily

               known

It could be, though the sharpness (the achiote)   

I note in others,

makes more sense

than my own distances. The agilities

               they show daily

               who do the world’s   

               businesses

               And who do nature’s   

               as I have no sense   

               I have done either

I have made dialogues,

have discussed ancient texts,

have thrown what light I could, offered   

what pleasures

doceat allows

               

               But the known?

This, I have had to be given,

a life, love, and from one man   

the world.

               Tokens.

               But sitting here

               I look out as a wind   

               and water man, testing   

               And missing

               some proof

I know the quarters

of the weather, where it comes from,   

where it goes. But the stem of me,   

this I took from their welcome,

or their rejection, of me

               And my arrogance

               was neither diminished   

               nor increased,

               by the communication

2

It is undone business

I speak of, this morning,   

with the sea

stretching out

from my feet