One Year Ago Today

Best cat ever. Still hurts. Momcat still looks for him. Words from a year ago below the fold

Tuts Under Her Breath and It Destroys Me for a Week

Downward my psyche's gondola despite painting's resumption, witness my head above, despite Momcat below waiting for our return from our late evening walk last night. Six days from today the one year anniversary of the morning I found Momcat's son dead in our front yard, he'd often come on walks with us. I've wondered if and how I'd commemerate the day, doing it today so I'm not consumed thinking about it the next six days 

Only a major fraction of the wheel's descent. No full catalog for you, just this: I've removed the CWCF you never noticed from title bar, that sometimes helps, will try *not* being Canary or Weathervane or Cassandra or Fool for now and see if that works. A friend tells me when she shows people the blog they sorta like the clusterf*ck content and comment but hate the mthrfckring this, mthrfckring that, and what the hell is with the placemats I paint and post? and another friend tells me she bets more than half the people on twitter following me who aren't bots mute me because of the relentless voluminous mthrfckring, including her, laugh, that's not why I've temporarily quit mthrfckring the clusterf*ck or am trending sideways, I've temporarily quit mthrfckring the clusterf*ck because I'm trending sideways in significant part from mthrfckrng the clusterf*ck. Happens, usually passes. Post title from the song not the poem. It hurts as much as ever when I think about Napoleon

HOW TO DISAPPEAR

Rae Armantrout

1

You had been swinging restlessly

between the appearance of spontaneity

and the appearance of serious thought.

You had been changing lanes

after a glance

in a mirror honest about

its tendency to distort.

What choice did you have?

It was soothing to watch

wisps of smoke

from a nearby chimney

disappearing

one by one.

2

Do you like pulses,

ridges, ripples

stretching into obscurity?

Would you prefer a flicker

to a steady light source?

This one stutters

slightly,

hesitant,

as if it could hold something

in reserve

Activating the Emergency Napoleon Alert System - UPDATED!

He showed up for dinner the first day we were gone with a scrape-wound between his ears, cat-sitter sent us a photo, looked ouchy if not dangerous and Nap let cat-sitter but antibiotic goop on the wound, cat-sitter hadn't seen him since Friday, we haven't seen him since we've been home, I'm sideways about it but Earthgirl is SIDEWAYS about it, this has always worked in the past, here we go.....

UPDATED! Bless the magic, it worked again, have this shitty blog's Theme Song Three!

The Dog at the Center of My Life Recognizes You've Come to Visit

• Seal Cove, Mt Desert Island, Maine, last night's fog at sunset
• We originally planned to leave for Maryland this morning but our hosts gave us two extra days in the house, leaving Sunday morning
• Yesterday rain and fog so we stayed off the mountains so as not to break our necks on wet rocks and wet roots, wet roots, the fuckers
• Last evening I threw another round of disc (while Earthgirl painted in Seal Cove) at Hapana Disc Course in Trenton, first town on the mainland after leaving Mt Desert Island, it's short and technical so even if I haven't been playing at home, hiking with Earthgirl instead, I can pretend my score (even Monday, -1 Tuesday, +3 Wednesday, -1 last evening) signifies I'm better than I actually am, roc

• Songs from the drive home from disc course last evening
• I am a sort of Slothrop: yesterday, within half an hour of seeing each, a story about an 84 year old woman in Southwest Harbor, a town five miles from where I type this sentence, getting a job as a hotel maid (in America this is presented as a feel-good story), and a story of just around the corner from my house in Maryland, three hundred yards at most, kablammed by thunderstorms Wednesday night
• First year here I haven't daydreamed of living here, Maine
• partially because I am fated to live in flat bland eternally gray Michigan unless and until my daughter moves elsewhere, which she won't
• not because being two weeks earlier than normal this year and catching the end of bug season reminds me there are only three months of the year I'd want to live here
• mostly because this year feels like an escape hatch from the accelerating shittiness and to live here would to bring the accelerating shittiness home to the escape (which is home for an 84 year old woman who needed take a job cleaning up after shits like me who fly in for a week and then leave)

• Who is the most dangerous fascist?
• Encapsulating mainstream Liberalism
• Motherfucking Democrats (at least my congressperson voted yes)
• Waking up is violent but easy
• Don't let a plague go to waste
• The pandemic is the least of it  
• The emotional equivalent of fuck you money
• The Edge of the Map
• Napoleon Emergency Alert System still active
• Recycled

              

HOW IT IS

Maxine Kumin

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?

A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.   

The dog at the center of my life recognizes   

you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic.

In the left pocket, a hole.

In the right, a parking ticket

delivered up last August on Bay State Road.   

In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,

a flinging from the pods of the soul.

My skin presses your old outline.Th

It is hot and dry inside.

 

I think of the last day of your life,

old friend, how I would unwind it, paste   

it together in a different collage,

back from the death car idling in the garage,   

back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,   

reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish   

into a ceremony of sandwich,

running the home movie backward to a space   

we could be easy in, a kitchen place

with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.

 

Dear friend, you have excited crowds

with your example. They swell

like wine bags, straining at your seams.   

I will be years gathering up our words,   

fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,

leaning my ribs against this durable cloth

to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

Soot and Glacier-Light

• First, Nap sighted, the alert is still active, on stand-by
• Hiked Great Wass, the single most unique hike we’ve done anywhere ever
• Loop runs through scrub pines and bogs and deep woods and over granite balds three miles to the ocean then two miles along ocean then a mile of deeper woods back to car
• drip told me about Great Wass before our trip two years ago, we met at a bar on University across from Hopkins a week before that vacation, hiked Great Wass first time that vacation
• Shared pints a few times, met through this blog, maybe some of you remember him here
• I’ve no contact with drip since we met at a bar on University across from Hopkins before we took our Maine trip two years ago
• I just emailed him

• >> Deleted bleggalgaze <<
• UPDATED! drip lives!
• Rain and fog this morning, Cadillac hike postponed, wet rocks = ouch
• Driving back from Great Wass traffic was jammed getting through Milbridge, and people along the route were in their yards watching, free food giveaway, hunger relief, hundreds of cars in line
• Seen relatively few Trump signs and flags, more east and north of Ellsworth, the town associated with Mount Desert Island's entry and the east end of touristy Downeast Maine on Route 1, and not a single Biden sign but about the same number of BLM and/or Hate Has No Place Here signs as Trump signs
• Meanwhile, in a town five miles from where I am typing this sentence

• Meanwhile, cut social security and medicare
• Meanwhile, pigs tear gas and assault peacefully protesting mothers
• Meanwhile, Joe Biden, a racist, calls Donald Trump, a racist, a racist, insists Donald Trump the first racist president ever
• Meanwhile, as far as I know, no one has asked Joe Biden what he thinks about stormtroopers attacking peacefully demonstrating mothers and he's not going to voluntarily comment much less condemn until and at least until someone dies
• Meanwhile, festering
• Meanwhile, vultures
• Meanwhile, motherfucking Democrats

 





RELEASING THE SHERPAS

Campbell McGrath

The last two sherpas were the strongest,

faithful companions, their faces wind-peeled,

streaked with soot and glacier-light on the snowfield

below the summit where we stopped to rest.

 

The first was my body, snug in its cap of lynx-

fur, smelling of yak butter and fine mineral dirt,

agile, impetuous, broad-shouldered,

alive to the frozen bite of oxygen in the larynx.

 

The second was my intellect, dour and thirsty,

furrowing its fox-like brow, my calculating brain

searching for some cairn or chasm to explain

my decision to send them back without me.

 

Looking down from the next, ax-cleft serac

I saw them turn and dwindle and felt unafraid.

Blind as a diamond, sun-pure and rarefied,

whatever I was then, there was no turning back.

That Whenever Any Formula of Grace Becomes Detained of These Endives, It Is the Rim of the Peppery to Aluminize or to Abominate It

Earthgirl painting in Seal Cove last night's sunset

• Meanwhile, life interrupted vacation, bubble of happy, pop
• Meanwhile, work interrupted vacation, bubble of happy, pop
• Meanwhile, Napoleon Emergency Alert System ON HIGH ALERT! permapop

• Reminder: Democrats are the enemy
• Ditto
• America's death tango with state failure
• Wall of Moms 
• The Battle of Portland
• Trumpfen Sturmabteilung  
• Falling apart
• Organization is our only option
• Prepare yourself for Trump Finally Presidential stories
• How easily idealism congeals into dogma
• Don't eat veggie burgers cooked at Burger King, dumdum 
• The MOCO teacher who lives in our house is as delighted to go virtual this Fall as she is miserable to go virtual this Fall 
• Reading about calibrated amnesia and America

Fully braced bubble
pop braced half-ass bubble pop
earned what pop I got





SHORTER AMERICAN MEMORY OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Rosmarie Waldrop

We holler these trysts to be self-exiled that all manatees are credited equi-distant, that they are endured by their Creditor with cervical unanswerable rims. that among these are lightning, lice, and the pushcart of harakiri. That to seduce these rims, graces are insulated among manatees, descanting their juvenile pragmatism from the consistency of the graced. That whenever any formula of grace becomes detained of these endives, it is the rim of the peppery to aluminize or to abominate it. and to insulate Newtonian grace. leaching its fountain pen on such printed matter and orienting its pragmatism in such formula, as to them shall seize most lilac to effuse their sage and harakiri.

Bubbles Band Against Each Other

It took until Tuesday morning but activating the Napoleon Emergency Alert System!

Reliable cat guy hasn't seen him, I take no chances

Meanwhile, in My Complicity

• Last night's sunset from Seal Cove
• I am happy, Earthgirl is happy
• The Napoleon Emergency Alert System activated, plague rampant, Brownshirts brownshirting, Bookkeeper, who promised not to bookkeeper me on vacation, bookkeepers me, I am happy, fine metaphors *teem* in My Complicity
• Earthgirl on South Bubble yesterday

SALVATIONS

Kay Ryan

Like hope

it springs

eternal,

existing in

discrete but

spherical

units, a

mist of total

but encapsulated

salvational

events. If

any two of

these bubbles

bang against

each other no

walls collapse

or double to

a larger chamber

unlike the halls

of soap.

Dead Birds in the Turbines

Buck Cove Mt Trail, Schoodic Penisula, Acadia National Park, yesterday, last hike of vacation.

Activated:

and

We'll see tonight if first luck.

UPDATE, 2:30 PM EDT same day:

• Sitting in the Portland Maine airport two hours ahead of flight home.
• I am telling you three times for the zillionth time, there is no better metaphor for motherfucking America than motherfucking helmetball. 
• UPDATE! With five minutes of tweeting out version of above, six unfollowed. Fine metaphors abound.
• The ghost pilot's last instructions.
• Twitter/blogger overlord Jon Schwartz - who I like! - tweeted 1. The most interesting thing about Ben Shapiro (the only interesting thing about him) is his deep commitment to being ignorant. Some people don't have access to knowledge. But he went to UCLA & Harvard Law School. They have libraries. His ignorance is an (unconscious) choice.
• I replied (forgive me, I'm foolish, small): Counterpoint: his ignorance is his JOB, one he chose and chooses to excel at. Stop thinking those preaching to the pig-ignorant are pig-ignorant. They are turds of a different smell.
• I do not understand granting cracker-whisperers the out of ignorance.
• I do not understand granting Liberal-whisperers the out of ignorance.
• Ben Shapiro (cashes check) doesn't know how the world works?
• NPR says car, not white racist asshole, killed anti-fascist protester.
• White supremacy has always been mainstream.
• Rachel Maddow (cashes check) doesn't know how the world works? 
• Waist deep in the Big Muddy.
• The Southwest flight to Chicago, docked at the gate our plane will dock, has dead birds in the turbines. 
• What another man spills. 
• Crash - me, not plane - not quite but almost imminent.

Last morning view from porch until next year.

in case of emergency the seventh and final theme of this systematic poem is the systematic way death undresses in front of you

Fields of ferns, acres of them, Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge.

Lengthy but mostly flat, knees this morning not barking.

I love bogs. I love heaths. I love scrub forests.

Pouring, 7:17AM Thursday morning, rain all day, what to do?

I know -

ACTIVATING THE NAPOLEON 

EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM!

Our housesitter/catsitter got married and moved to Michigan, the woman who comes once a day to feed the cats has not seen Napoleon (or MomCat) since we left on vacation. Neighbors to our left are building an addition, MomCat sleeps in their backyard, the elementary school across the street is tearing down the portable classrooms, Napoleon sleeps underneath them to wait out the Summer sun.

ACTIVATING THE MOMCAT 

EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM!

• It is not unusual for Napoleon and MomCat to not appear for strangers, and
• the food put out is eaten (though we've possum and raccoon scavengers), but
• I will never forgive myself if I never see them again.
• Not just this, but the fuck with forlorn on vacation?
• New Richard Thompson? His band coming to DC November 9th?

• I dunno.
• Not dead yet.
• More definitive proof we are fucked. 
• The same desperate need.
• Fuck professional Democrats. 
• I am not Green but like this defense of the Greens.
• Verily. 
• Exsanguination, coming to a field meadow near you.
• I need give Rachel Cusk a second try.
• I can't read this trip.
• I can't write this trip (except here, this fucking box in a box in a box).
• Was Geddy Lee playing a trick?
• (Elric, a bass player, tells me Lee is one of the great bass players ever.)

THE ARKANSAS PRISON SYSTEM

Frank Stanford

Is like a lyric poem

with seven basic themes

first the cottonpicker

dragging behind it a wagon of testicles

a pair of pliers which can fill in

for a cross in a pinch

then there is the warm pond

between the maiden’s thighs

next we have some friends

of yours and mine

who shall be with us always

Pablo the artist

the pubis of the moon

Pablo the cellist

panther of silence

Pablo the poet

the point of no return

and in case of emergency

the seventh and final theme

of this systematic poem

is the systematic way

death undresses in front of you
    

Deactivating the Napoleon Emergency Alert System

He was on the top step waiting for me just now. It's blessed uncanny, it's worked every time for ten years.

Deactivating the Napoleon Emergency Alert System

• Worked every time so far. He was at the side door this morning along with his mother and brother.
• ▼ before they go stale. There was a brief Hillaryite Colleague interaction report, but fuck that, at least today. It included the words Tim and Caine, and double-fuck that. Dear Hillaryite Colleague, stop the fuck nadering me.
• Drumpfreich.
• Ed's Complaint Against the Clusterfuck (generously complemented with a live Sonic Youth set from 1996).
• UPDATE! Reminder: fuck the DNC.
• Give Efren Paredes his life back.
• MORE ▲
• Not homeless, and Miles Davis.
• Recognition denied.
• The linguistics of my next band name.
• David Antin's new talk poem.
• Creeley's Oppen.
• Ashbery's The Skaters.
• A close reading of Ashbery's Skaters.
• Ashbery's birthday in six days, expect more.
• You're absolutely right, I haven't played Zoviet France here in a while. Click for more.

A WORLDLY COUNTRY

John Ashbery

Not the smoothness, not the insane clocks on the square,

the scent of manure in the municipal parterre,

not the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird,

not the fresh troops that needed freshening up. If it occurred

in real time, it was OK, and if it was time in a novel

that was OK too. From palace and hovel

the great parade flooded avenue and byway

and turnip fields became just another highway.

Leftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens

and geese, who squawked like the very dickens.

There was no peace in the bathroom, none in the china closet

or the banks, where no one came to make a deposit.

In short all hell broke loose that wide afternoon.

By evening all was calm again. A crescent moon

hung in the sky like a parrot on its perch.

Departing guests smiled and called, "See you in church!"

For night, as usual, knew what it was doing,

providing sleep to offset the great ungluing

that tomorrow again would surely bring.

As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing

puzzled me: What had happened, and why?

One minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness,

and the next, peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness.

So often it happens that the time we turn around in

soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in.

And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea

we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.

Activating the Napoleon Emergency Alert System

At Earthgirl's request. It's been three days, she's a bad feeling. This has always worked before.

Deactivating the Napoleon Emergency Alert System

Worked again.

The neighbors to our left have three boys, all born one year apart, 2, 3, 4, and they think chasing cats fun. The house two doors to our right is a hideous new pop-up (even by hideous new pop-up standards, people can vouch). The motherfucking flippers are asking $400K more than best possible scenario, and this past Saturday I saw them angrily and loudly chase Momcat and Napoleon out of their yard as if they are the reason no one has bought the hideous new pop-up with the stupid-greedy price and therefore the reason the flippers' creditors call hourly seven days a week. I hadn't seen Nap since. Nap's taken care of himself for seven years, eight? but I worry. Plus, to extra-expedite Napoleon's return I had just finished a new header for NAPOLEON EMERGENCY ALERT to keep at top of shitty blog until his return or forever. Per every time, it has been destroyed, would be stale next time.

ACTIVATING THE NAPOLEON EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM!

This time feels different. I usually wait a week, been only three days, but this time feels different.

Faith

Earthgirl texted me last night so I put up this (taken down to not temp jinx, but I've witnesses who can vouch it was up):

Activating the Napoleon Emergency Alert System. Been six days, plus school across street started Monday plus we had loud work done on the house, so ACTIVATING THE NAPOLEON ALERT SYSTEM! Send good thoughts.

And then, when I got home at ten o'clock:

Mysteries of faith. I don't know how it works, I don't know why it works, I just know it works.