Monday, March 18, 2019

Crowned with Loneliness and Suffered for Friendship

  • My mother-in-law had a dear friend in Florida
  • she (the dear friend) and her husband now house adjacent to Friendship Airport
  • both are younger than us by short of a decade
  • we drove through Potomac on River to get to Potomac on River
  • he doesn't hike, he dines with us (I like him
  • we dined the night before Mexican place in Glen
  • Burnie) I thought (I wish I was eating something else)
  • hike to the cliffs one I've hiking monthly since I could drive
  • we drove past the Versailles on River between Beltway and Potomac
  • the palace has been on sale sold on sale sold on sale sold it's a laundromat
  • I said when they asked, it's even built for the guillotine
  • then remembered today's the day I stop said she I said in real life too









READ THESE

Mary Karr

The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’s foliage into bloom
where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love
before at last taking himself away. His head away. His
recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine
themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more
than instruments of his creation. Pawns.
Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us
studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead.
   
Once he was not a king, only a pale boy staring down
from the high dive. The contest was seriousness
he decided, who shaped himself for genus genius
and nothing less. Among genii, whoever dies first wins.
Or so he thought. He wanted the web browsers to ping
his name in literary mention everywhere on the world wide web.
   
He wanted relief from his head, which acted as spider
and inner web weaver. The boy was a live thing tumbled in its thread
and tapped and fed off, siphoned from. His head kecked back
and howling from inside the bone castle from whence he came
to hate the court he held.
  
He was crowned with loneliness
and suffered for friendship, for fealty
of the noblest sort. The invisible crown
rounded his temples tighter than any turban,
more binding than a wedding band,
and he sat in his round tower
on the rounding earth.
                                                     Read these,
saith the King, and put down his pen, hearing
himself inwardly holding forth on the dullest
aspects of the human heart
with the sharpest possible wit. Unreadable
as Pound on usury or Aquinas on sex.
   
I know the noose made an oval portrait frame for his face.
And duct tape around the base of the Ziploc
bag was an air-tight chamber
for the regal head—most serious relic,
breathlessly lecturing in the hall of silence.

2 comments:

  1. Unreadable as ... Aquinas on sex.

    https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/aquinas-sex.asp

    a 21st century view by a Catholic calling for reform:


    An anonymous supporter of church reform went the whole Martin Luther, pinning 21 theses on the door of St. Peter Cathedral in Erie, Pennsylvania, Sept. 13. The 21 points called for, among other items, ordaining women and increasing lay involvement in church governance.

    Request a sample issue of our award-winning newspaper.

    It was a clear mimicking of the Protestant reformer's 1517 posting of 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. The Erie document is addressed to Pope Francis and written on behalf of the Catholic laity.

    The style of the author is more literary than dogmatic.

    The first thesis states a quote often attributed to playwright Oscar Wilde: "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex is about power."

    Other points mix in laudatory praise on the church, at one point describing it as the most charitable institution in human history, while castigating abuses which "irreparably cleave the Church from the embodiment of Jesus' true essence and mission." It argues that the laity should quit kneeling and rather stand in protest, and it blames much of the sex abuse crisis on clericalism.

    The document states that priestly celibacy and the church's view on sexuality "has fed its unique culture of secrecy and exclusion," creating "a cloistered, secret world of men, accountable only to one another."


    https://www.ncronline.org/news/parish/anonymous-author-posts-21-theses-erie-cathedral-calling-discussion-reform

    ReplyDelete
  2. 1)the author of the 21 theses is anonymous, but some suspect that sister joan chittister may have had a hand in the drafting of this document

    2)one of the sentences i copied and pasted above, from an award-winning newspaper's website, was not actually part of the article i was quoting - alert readers (more alert than i) may have already surmised this

    ReplyDelete