Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Bone-Filled Egg of Osprey



  • All I want to do is hike with Earthgirl
  • I fine-tuned Red Osprey, I'm always tuning Red Osprey
  • I just need find my effing sticks and tune *them* with Red Osprey
  • only after I tune me with them
  • The word philanthropist is poisonous, or, *my* ethical problem with art museums (he
  • types on evil empires free fucking blaaging because self-incriminating (he
  • has said this three times) platform
  • Maggie's weekly links
  • The father of teeth 
  • Virginia, upper piedmont and mountain, lordy




  • Trumbo Hollow, me, goldenrod (for stupid I'm), AT stile, Red Osprey, Doctor Sevrin ears
  • Photos by Earthgirl (for stupid I'm), you knew that
  • The curse of moral purity
  • I typed this sentence Sunday morning in the breakfast lounge of a Comfort Inn in Woodstock VA, the hotel tunes its breakfast lounge television to the Weather Channel, whether a Comfort Inn business decision or the local owner's who knows, but wise (it seems to me, reading the crowd in the breakfast lounge)
  • Elephant
  • { feuilleton }'s weekly links
  • Their own approach to book criticism





THE ORIGIN OF ORDER

Pattiann Rogers

Stellar dust has settled.
It is green underwater now in the leaves
Of the yellow crowfoot. Its vacancies are gathered together
Under pine litter as emerging flower of the pink arbutus.
It has gained the power to make itself again
In the bone-filled egg of osprey and teal.

One could say this toothpick grasshopper
Is a cloud of decayed nebula congealed and perching
On his female mating. The tortoise beetle,
Leaving the stripped veins of morning glory vines
Like licked bones, is a straw-colored swirl
Of clever gases.

At this moment there are dead stars seeing
Themselves as marsh and forest in the eyes
Of muskrat and shrew, disintegrated suns
Making songs all night long in the throats
Of crawfish frogs, in the rubbings and gratings
Of the red-legged locust. There are spirits of orbiting
Rock in the shells of pointed winkles
And apple snails, ghosts of extinct comets caught
In the leap of darting hare and bobcat, revolutions
Of rushing stone contained in the sound of these words.

The paths of the Pleiades and Coma clusters
Have been compelled to mathematics by the mind
Contemplating the nature of itself
In the motions of stars. The patterns
Of any starry summer night might be identical
To the summer heavens circling inside the skull.
I can feel time speeding now in all directions
Deeper and deeper into the black oblivion
Of the electrons directly behind my eyes.

Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind
Has been obligated from the beginning
To create an ordered universe
As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.

2 comments:

  1. that weather channel tv in the breakfast lounge of the c______ inn was an excellent choice - at the b_______ inn i stayed in during my visit to the old country early this month they also chose wisely in the breakfast area - they had no tv at all

    and speaking of that visit, here's something i wrote to my brother about it which i am reminded of by pattiann rogers' poem

    The room we shared at the B_______ Inn, with its smaller, lower side bed, reminded me of our bedroom in Framingham the year we lived there [with our mother's parents, while our father was in Korea] - you had the lower trundle bed then, Mom was in the middle bed, while I was next to the window. I still remember the metallic smell of the windowscreen as I looked out in wonder at the stars at night after everyone had gone to bed.



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  2. also potentially relevant -

    The last two paragraphs of Erich Fromm's The Heart of Man

    Man's heart can harden;
    it can become inhuman, yet never nonhuman.
    It always remains man's heart.
    We are all determined by the fact that we have been born human,
    and hence by the never-ending task of having to make choices.
    We must choose the means together with the aims.
    We must not rely on anyone's saving us,
    but be very aware of the fact that wrong choices make us incapable of saving ourselves.

    Indeed, we must become aware in order to choose the good --
    but no awareness will help us if we have lost the capacity to be moved
    by the distress of another human being,
    by the friendly gaze of another person,
    by the song of a bird, by the greenness of grass.

    If man becomes indifferent to life there is no longer any hope that he can choose the good.
    Then, indeed, his heart will have so hardened that his "life" will be ended.
    If this should happen to the entire human race or to its most powerful members,
    the the life of mankind may be extinguished at the very moment of its greatest promise.

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