I Needed Very Badly to Take Refuge in Mediocrity

• I sit in the living room of the B&B we're staying in Easton as I type this sentence
• Earthgirl attending a workshop, she's here three nights, me, no
• she likes B&Bs and I like my wife 
• Driving the long deadend peninsulas of tidewater Maryland remind me of the long deadend penisulas of downeast Maine
• Hummingbird Inn on Aurora, as much as I can like a B&B I like this one, and the Szechuan Brussel Sprouts for one appetizer and Baked Beets with Roasted Peanuts and Feta for another at Out of the Fire on Goldsborough last night, this does not suck
• Flint Michigan does not have potable water
• While she painted I drove south of Cambridge to walk the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, it more than not sucked
• Driving Maryland's Eastern Shore makes me think of Barth's *Sotweed,* it's been at least a decade
• I do understand birders though slap me if I ever buy binocs

• What we owe a rabbit: on our obligations to other animals
• White privilege, white advantage, white and human misery
• Chomsky and the compatible Left
• The Earth is kept from spinning of its axis by unblinkered madmen  
• Rant
• True 
• Hobsbawn
• Pizzt at Belmont L
• I put latanoprost in my eyes every night
• On seeing and not seeing further
• { feuilleton}'s weekly links
• I almost love Pavement, almost, the failure is mine, when I hate a band's signature song - I hate *Cut My Hair* - it taints everything for me...
  
• ASHBERYLAND!

PROOF OF POETRY

Tom Sleigh

I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter

and in my twenties I almost ended up there—

 

and then as an alternative to vodka, to live

 

alone like a hermit philosopher and court

the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway—

 

and then there were the years in which

 

I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity,

years like blunt scissors cutting out careful squares,

 

and that was the worst, the very worst—

 

you could say that always my life

was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart—

 

my life like scraps stitched together in a dream

 

in which animals and people,

plants, chimeras, stars,

 

even minerals were in a preordained harmony—

 

a dream forgotten because it has to be forgotten,

but that I looked for desperately, but only sporadically

 

found in fragments, a hand lifted to strike

 

or caress or simply lifted for some unknown reason—

and in memory too, some specific pain, sensation of cold or warmth.

 

I loved that harmony in all its stages of passion,

 

the voices still talking inside me . . . but then, instead of harmony,

there was nothing but rags scattered on the ground.

 

And maybe that's all it means to be a poet.