Everyone in a Minute Will Be Somewhere Else Entirely

My Father's Day gift from Planet!

• Not arrived yet, the iPhone case from a photo I took of Fleabus last month 
• she's smaller frailer since the last time I said she is smaller frailer, smaller frailer than when I typed the first part of this sentence yesterday
• Today is the birthday of the actor who plays my long time digital avatar not only here but until recently on twitter, now replaced by Fleabus, still over on the blogroll here
• I will never say the debranding is done (and I've abandoned no long-time gags) but enough small erasures for now, I'm guessing
• Hymn to Life
• This week's forgotten and just found in my stacks:

• The ungoverned world
• Did they tell Trump about the empty seats before he walked to the microphone I wondered then remembered Trump's campaign manager just tweeted Antifa blocked hundreds of thousands entering
• Birth chart
• Pseudo-materialism and class identity
• Neoliberal desegregation
• The heat jeers of the world hurl out tweets, there is an opposition party in America 
• like there's an opposition party in America 
• There is no opposition party in America
• Revolution blues
• Ransacking
• The unfinished project of the Enlightenment 
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links  
• Topoi
• Ben Lerner's oblique elegy to Ashbery
• I read Atocha Station and remember liking it but haven't read the next two of *that* trilogy, Anne's been beheaded, I'm waiting for vacation to read the third of the trilogy when Cromwell is beheaded, what to read next if in fact I can read novels temporarily again.... 
• One day I suddenly noticed

INTERESTING TIMES

Mark Jarman

Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event.

You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc:

About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon.

Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, black with serenity.

How interesting will our times become? How much more interesting can they become?

  

A crow with something dangling from its beak flaps onto a telephone pole top, daintily,

And croaks its victory to other crows and tries to keep its morsel to itself.

A limp shape, leggy, stunned, drops from the black beak’s scissors like a rag.

We drive past, commenting, and looking upward. A sunny morning, too cold to be nesting,

Unless that is a nest the crow has seized, against the coming spring.

  

We’ve been at this historical site before, but not in any history we remember.

The present has been cloaked in cloud before, and not on any holy mountaintop.

To know the stars will one day fly apart so far they can’t be seen

Is almost a relief. For the future flies in one direction—toward us.

And the only way to sidestep it—the only way—is headed this way, too.

  

So, look. That woman’s got a child by the hand. She’s dragging him across the street.

He’s crying and she’s shouting, but we see only dumbshow. Their breath is smoke.

Will she give in and comfort him? Will he concede at last? We do not know.

Their words are smoke. In a minute they’ll be somewhere else entirely.

Everyone in a minute will be somewhere else entirely. As the crow flies.