A week from the moment I type this it will be our first full day on Mount Desert Island and we're waiting for our second sunset at Seal Cove. L will have kayaked and painted, I will have played thirty-six holes at Habana Disc Course in Trenton. I wonder where we hiked earlier in the day and know we stopped at the Hippie Organic Farmstore on Beech Hill Road in Somesville and beets were or will be roasted
The Michigan trip just weeks ago, the first since the shitty boss retired, the first since the best cat died, unlike and better than any vacation I can remember with a new absence of anxiety about what shittiness awaits me from the shitty boss when I get back and constant worry the catsitters can't send me daily timestamped photo proof of Napoleon's continued existence. This the second, and for two weeks, and it's L and my favorite time together, and she asked me if I want her to show me acrylics, opaque on grids instead of transparent, I'll try, I plan to have an supremely excellent time in these horrible days with the ironclad inevitably of shittiness we know can't be stopped, there's a reason all but two posts a year are tagged My Complicity
END OF DAYS ADVICE FROM AN EX-ZOMBIE
Michael Derrick Hudson
To think I used to be so good at going to pieces
gobbling my way through the cops
and spooking what’s left of the girls. How’d I
get so far, sloughing off one knuckle at a time,
jerking my mossy pelt along
ruined streets? Those insistent, dreadful thuds
when we stacked our futile selves
against locked doors. Our mumbles and groans!
Such hungry nights! Staggering through the grit
of looted malls, plastered with tattered
flags of useless currency, I’d slobbered all over
the busted glass and merchandise of America ...
But first you’ll have to figure out those qualities
separating what’s being alive from
who’s already dead. Most of you will flunk that.
Next learn how to want one thing over and over,
night after night. Most of you
are good at that. Don’t get tired. Don’t cough
into your leftovers. Don’t think. Always stand
by your hobgoblin buddies. Clutch
at whatever’s there. Learn to sniff out sundowns.
1/speaking of beech hill farm, i learned this morning that it is part of the college of the atlantic, which awards bachelor's and master's degrees solely in the field of human ecology, an interdisciplinary approach to learning
ReplyDelete2/speaking of maine - james tate mentioned it in his last poem
I sat at my desk and contemplated all that I had accomplished this year. I had won the hot dog eating contest on Rhode Island. No, I hadn’t. I was just kidding. I was the arm wrestling champion in Portland, Maine. False. I caught the largest boa constrictor in Southern Brazil. In my dreams. I built the largest house out of matchsticks in all the United States. Wow! I caught a wolf by its tail. Yumee. I married the Princess of Monaco. Can you believe it? I fell off of Mount Everest. Ouch! I walked back up again. It was tiring. Snore. I set a record for sitting in my chair and snoring longer than anybody. Awake! I set a record for swimming from one end of my bath to the other in No Count, Nebraska. Blurb. I read a book written by a dove. Great! I slept in my chair all day and all night for thirty days. Whew! I ate a cheeseburger every day for a year. I never want to do that again. A trout bit me when I was washing the dishes. But I couldn’t catch him. I flew over my hometown and didn’t recognize anyone. That’s how long it’s been. A policeman stopped me on the street and said he was sorry. He was looking for someone who looked just like me and had the same name. What are the chances?
3/an encounter with a policeman on the street also occurs in tate's poem it happens like this
https://poets.org/poem/it-happens
my own anagogic exegesis of this poem - guaranteed to be correct or your money cheerfully refunded some restrictions may apply - appears at
https://www.blckdgrd.com/2014/11/if-it-would-help-i-would-paint-my-house.html
i assert that The policeman has stepped back, with remorse, from changing his life...
Yes, College of the Atlantic runs the farm, the college itself is tiny, just up the hill north of Bar Harbor, on the Mount Desert Narrows. If I was a science-driven kid looking for a college I'd apply. Their farm produces incredible produce, especially beets, red and golden, and carrots, gonna roast them every day
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