I Am Not Asleep, But I See a Limb

• I stayed the night last night in my parents' house in Gaithersburg for the first time in decades for reasons a very few of you know, the rest can guess, I'm typing this in my parents' house Sunday morning, this is the most I will publish about it here or there until and unless I do
• My house ten miles from here in Kensington is a mile from the main B&O rail line west out of DC, same line as my parents' house in Gaithersburg though the house I grew up in only 200 yards away from the same railroad line, the fastest walk home from Gaithersburg to Kensington or Kensington to Gaithersburg if necessary (and daylight) not 355 but B&O
• I hear trains when I sleep at home, yes, but not like I heard trains last night in Gaithersburg, all through the night, two, three freight trains an hour
• Rick Nielsen is 73 today

• Conversation from the house in Gaithersburg yesterday afternoon: my wife and brother Elric think Trump uniquely evil, I made the point I make here daily, he is not more uniquely evil than any other evil fuck who'd want to be potus, he is just the most uniquely vulgar of all the evil fucks who wanted and got to be potus, and my Aunt State Department Bigwig agreed
• And the vulgarity is a feature, not a bug, I said, and my aunt's not ready to go *that* far though she doesn't think I'm wrong
• Why everything is fucked
• Yes, it's been CSX not B&O for decades, B&O it is 
• Harper's Bizarre Consumer Price Index
• Pink slime 
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links
• Lit Hub's weekly links
• On the 30th anniversary of Beckett's death
• I'm back on the Murnane 
• Santa alone at Lakeforest
• Solemn solstice
• On Hejinian
• Sunn O)))'s 2019

TRANCENDENCE OF JANUS

Frank Stanford

I am not asleep, but I see

a limb, the fingers of death, the ghost

of an anonymous painter

leaving the prints of death

on the wall; the bright feathers

of soft birds blowing

away in the forest;

the bones of fish and

the white backs of strange women;

your breathing

like the slow thunder

on the other side of some river

as you sleep beside me; old

dancing teachers weeping in their offices;

toads with bellies as quiet

as girls asleep in mansions, dreaming

of saddles and pulling the sheets

between their legs; fireflies

going to sleep on moonseed flowers

around a plantation gazebo at dawn;

a girl sweating in bed; hawks drifting

through the moon; a woman’s hair,

the flavor of death, floating

in the fog like a flag

on a ship full of ghosts,

the ghosts of soldiers

searching for the graves of their mothers; june bugs

listening to Leoncavallo;

christ weeping on Coney Island,

inevitable, like a fissure

in a faggot’s ass; a widower

with no sons, a lonesome janitor,

a worm in the sun, the dusty sockets

of poets, who have lost their eyes, their