like a downhill brakes-burned freight train full of pig iron ingots

• Day one of this weekend's hikes, Thudner's vacation stomp, Cacapon State Park, near Berkeley Springs, eastern West Virginia panhandle, Ziler Loop, good hard uphill, hard, rocky (and rockwet) downhill, I said to Earthgirl I can't find my sticks, you can't find my sticks, I (k)need new sticks for rockwet downhills, the photo below the start of the downhill, it was 8o and humid and thunderstorm caught us but Fall is coming (update! day two):

• Dinner Saturday night in Wincester, pedestrian mall, small private outdoor store, scored not only good maps of northern-most George Washington National Forest hiking but a new pair of Black Diamond FLZ sticks, break into three, fit into pack, don't have to strap to back, there's a reason all but two posts a year tagged My Complicity.

• The television in the breakfast lounge of this Comfort Inn in Wincester Virginia has the Weather Channel on, perhaps this is a corporate dictate (or at least suggestion).
• Contrast/Compare
• Landmark of my youth demolished (was a duckpin bowling alley before it was a restaurant, I bowled in the first, never ate at the second)
• Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right
• I vouch for The Octopus Museum, it's in daypack back in room where Earthgirl's still sleeping as I type this (I will scan another poem for next post with poem, meanwhile here's an earlier poem, Postfeminism)
• Stream three Stereolab reissues
• 10 Links from a Balcony in Toronto (also too an experiment, if what happened before happens again I'll elaborate)
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links

                       
AND STILL IT COMES

Thomas Lux

like a downhill brakes-burned freight train

full of pig iron ingots, full of lead

life-size statues of Richard Nixon,

like an avalanche of smoke and black fog

lashed by bent pins, the broken-off tips

of switchblade knives, the dust of dried offal,

remorseless, it comes, faster when you turn your back,

faster when you turn to face it,

like a fine rain, then colder showers,

then downpour to razor sleet, then egg-size hail,

fist-size, then jagged

laser, shrapnel hail

thudding and tearing like footsteps

of drunk gods or fathers; it comes

polite, loutish, assured, suave,

breathing through its mouth

(which is a hole eaten by a cave),

it comes like an elephant annoyed,

like a black mamba terrified, it slides

down the valley, grease on grease,

like fire eating birds’ nests,

like fire melting the fuzz

off a baby’s skull, still it comes: mute

and gorging, never

to cease, insatiable, gorging

and mute.