Thursday, November 5, 2020

A Dead Bird Is Not a Dead Bird I Was Once Told By Someone Who Knows

Thank goodness it hasn't ended, my Franz Wright binge, the past string of poems from his volume of prose poems, Kindertotenwald, if you want a copy and ask nice and I like you, it's pitch perfect for the clusterfuck and not at all about anyone's clusterfuck but his and yours and mine







DEAD SEAGULL

Franz Wright

Seagull in the corn, postage stamp-size cornfield in the woods, in the middle of the state, and how you ever got here. Weather of heaven, July Massachusetts, the blue sky one endless goodbye. Give me a minute, maggot-swarming preview of the future, give me a moment. You can hone a blade until there is no blade, or dwell with magnifying glass so long on a word that finally it darkens, is not, and fire in widening circles consumes the world. For a moment only, stay with me, mystery. Before you change completely into something other, slow cloud, entrance, spell, not yet remembered name, stay; tell me what you mean. A dead bird is not a dead bird I was once told by someone who knows.

2 comments:

  1. i liked this - with regard to trump's good friday and easter sunday - fintan o'toole wrote

    We have, after all, already witnessed the Good Friday and Easter Sunday of Donald Trump. In a grotesque parody of the Christian narrative, Trump presented his contraction of Covid-19 not as a consequence of his own narcissistic recklessness but as a Jesus-like self-sacrifice—he caught the virus on behalf of the people. Trump “died,” was in the “tomb” of Walter Reed hospital for three days and then rose again and appeared to many. This fable seems to have worked for his supporters, electrifying them with its evidence of their leader’s indefatigability. The deaths of others—230,000 victims of Covid-19 by election day—did not prompt a turn against the president who presided over them. His base acted, rather, as the foil for his miraculous, manic display of vivacity in the last days of the campaign.

    ...Trump, at his first rally after his resurrection, posed as an immortal (“I went through it. Now they say I’m immune. I feel so powerful.”)

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  2. here is paula white, trump's spiritual adviser, praying for trump's victory - the bopping cat in the foreground has been added, and the musical soundtrack, but the guy walking around with towels over his arm is in the original - his function is to use those towels to protect the modesty of skirt-wearing women who fall down 'slain in the spirit'

    https://twitter.com/Laurie_Garrett/status/1324468399972515840?s=20

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