Saturday, March 7, 2020

I Love You as a Sheriff Searches for a Walnut

View at 630 this morning from our bedroom window of the cottage we are renting near Chelsea Michigan 



  • Michigan's primary this Tuesday, I was curious to see the ratio of Biden to Sanders signs, I can give you an exact figure, Zero to Zero, not a single sign, not a single bumpersticker, and not a single sign or bumpersticker for local elections and referendums either. We drove directly from Detroit airport to Chelsea for lunch then drove back roads for three hours, even drove to downtown Jackson to see what downtown Jackson looks like, not a single sign, not a single bumpersticker. 
  • UPDATE! Spent three hours today in and around downtown Detroit, not a single sign
  • Planet (who's only been in Michigan a year and a half) says everyone knows who votes for who and knows nobody will change their mind and since they are neighbors what's the point of antagonizing a neighbor especially since penalty for doing so a keyed car or a hanged cat
  • I don't watch TV so no idea if there are political commercials and I'm listening to music on my phone in the car, this came on yesterday:




  • Yes, it would have been serendipitous if this Martha and the Muffins song had come on but I will not falsely say it did out of not blaspheming Serendipity 
  • This is true
  • UPDATE! Neoliberal plague 
  • Welcoming the highly gendered articles on witchiness and bitchiness
  • On the New York Times article red-baiting Sanders
  • Joe when he was lucid
  • What if there's no hope
  • Not going to happen, Warren will support Biden either openly or tacitly 
  • We're so boned
  • End of an Error: on the spate of litblog bleggicides (last post I linked to Time's Flow Stemmed's) 
  • Delayed (but inevitably will be >>deleted<<) bleggalgaze
  • Don't know why the New York Review of Books tweeted out this 1998 essay by Kenneth Koch on The Language of Poetry, but yay 
  • This Koch poem is my favorite but I've posted it here before often (and when I used a much smaller font than I need to now because my eyes sucks, I do the largest font possible for me, not you, and the poem is long)
  • Speaking of my eyes and my complicity at a friend's insistence I borrowed her Kindle white screen, told me she thought she'd lost reading novels because her eyes hurt after ten minutes of reading a book too but some one loaned her a Kindle white screen and told her eyes don't hurt and my friend told me it's true and I'm telling you it's true too
  • I hate it but not as much as I hate not reading 
  • A bashful young wombat
  • This was in the car yesterday too:





         
TO YOU

Kenneth Koch

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
Through which he saw her head, connecting with
Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;
For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not
Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a
Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails
In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from
The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;
I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields
Always, to be near you, even in my heart
When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you
Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to
The place where I again think of you, a new
Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow
Of a ship which sails
From Hartford to Miami, and I love you
Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun
Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

3 comments:

  1. "Planet (who's only been in Michigan a year and a half) says everyone knows who votes for who and knows nobody will change their mind and since they are neighbors what's the point of antagonizing a neighbor especially since penalty for doing so a keyed car or a hanged cat..."

    If this isn't the opener of a chilling 1970s Dystopian Sci Fi novel, what is?

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  2. hey.i've only been in michigan for 57 years, but Planet's assessment seems accurate. only i'd say folks around here would just think about keying my car or hanging my cat, they wouldn't do it cuz we keep the fuck off each others property

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  3. Another great is gone, McCoy Tyner has passed away:

    https://www.sfgate.com/news/us/article/McCoy-Tyner-iconic-and-influential-jazz-pianist-15113753.php

    In fact I was just listening to Coltrane's My Favorite Things album and thinking about how lovely Tyner's solo on that tune was, simple yet sophisticated. But most of all how beautiful his solo is.
    Almost all the greats who developed modern jazz are gone. A sad day.

    I don't watch tv either, but I get links to stupid tube from various readings to highlights of bobble-heads having melt downs. It's pretty funny really. They get this real SERIOUS look on their face when they talk about BERNIE. Then their mouths flap up and down while their body vibrates with the abject terror of it all. Of course none of that hilarity compares to the absurdities and outright lies that comes spilling out of their mouths as if they just swallowed something horrible and couldn't spit it out fast enough. I don't know how anyone can listen to this sophomoric drivel and take these idiots seriously. However it's a fact that people do.

    ReplyDelete