The Thrum Escaped the Darkness of the Drum

We bought thirteen acres of undeveloped fields and woods of a former farm in Dexter Township, Washtenaw County, Michigan, a perfect twenty minutes away from my daughter's house, and roughly ten miles away from Ann Arbor, an hour, hour and a half from Detroit, traffic depending, near trails mostly flat but in the woods, a disc golf course five minutes by car, half an hour by walk (I've seen the baskets, haven't played, haven't played period since before the plague and months before that, the fuck wrong with me). If I build a course on the acres if you buy me a basket I'll print and post a nice Michigan winter-protected sponsorship sign thanking you, if you get in first the signature hole can be Your Name Memorial Hole

My single goal is if I must be a Michigan citizen it's not until 2025 (and is the rough timeline), I have no desire to live in a state where my vote counts for more than the nothing it counts for in Maryland, by 2028 nobody's vote will matter

This van was parked on campus last Friday, saw the slogan before I knew I can build a disc golf course in Michigan (yes, purpled out, this would be a stupid thing to get hassled over even though in praise of Serendipity)

Nothing more imminent, I love where I live now, and not just because my vote doesn't matter here, this an investment in an eventual future

Reminder: between me and blugger a blegroll disappeared, and now blugger be broken, can't add new blags to blegrolls, until it's fixed please (a) remind me if you were on that blegroll and (b), like Mongo did the day before yesterday, email me if you have a new post

UPDATE! Just was able to add a new bligrall down below Doctor Sevrin's ear from the layout page, bark at me you site, effing blooger seems to have fixed the issue

• Obamamotherfucker's music taste is as shitty as you'd expect
• His royal motherfuckingness
• Yes, and is Reason Two for the ratfuckery
• Biden's embrace of Trump's ratfuckery
• Why the military establishment backed Biden
• The incoherence of Biden's platitudes
• Smarter than a box of rocks
• I suffered, therefore so must others
• An archeology of resistance
• I will take 95 degrees with a heat index of 104 ten out of ten days versus one day of any day colder than 40 with wind greater than 10 mph, give or take
• Your eyes during plague
• I wish my daughter lived in Not-Michigan
• Berryman's Ball Poem
• I like but don't love Cabaret Voltaire, there's a new album (and Kirk interview)
• Three new G.C. Waldrep poems
• Reading JR
• On poets and prizes
• Apocalypse
• The Clean on the Flying Nun sound!
• This is wonderful:
  
  

SIX REVISIONS

Jane Huffman

The doctor holds my chest against the discus, listens like the fish below the ice listens to the fisherman. “Medicine,” he says, “is not an exact science.”

He listens like the ice fisherman listens to the fish. I breathe into a nebulizer and think about translation—inexact art. A fine, particulate mist.

Snow has fallen on
still-green grass,
daubed with yellow leaves.

___

Three takes on a line from St. Augustine’s Confessions. An acquaintance posted one online to the delight of followers, of us, and in delight, I went to the source, the lexicon: three alike, online translators, some fishy, copied, pasted, fished out of the public sphere. And each rings like a different key.

Snow has fallen
on [yellow] grass, daubed with
[still-green] leaves.

___

Poor old pear-thief Augustine, half-biographer:

     1. “Where should my heart flee to in escaping from my heart?”
     2. “Where could my heart flee to in escaping from my heart.” [sic]
     3. “For where could my heart flee from my heart?”

[Grass] has fallen
on [still-white snow] daubed
with [yellow] leaves.

___

In the first translation is a hammering. “Should”—a moral judgment. An oiled object laid bare on a linen bed. “Shouldn’t” tied around the “should” with butcher’s string.

In the second, a yip, a certainty, desperate in its forwardness. “Where could?” as if the possible eluded him. To boot, denied its final mark. The thought falling from “Where could?” like rain from a cloud, a vanishing source.

Grass has fallen
on [yellow] snow daubed
with [snow-white] leaves.

___

“This will cut the cough off  from the brain,” the doctor says, offers me a tiny cup of codeine-orange syrup. The ache escapes like orange silk out of my orange lung. I slide into a mirror of my feelings, my face enlarged, expanding like a sponge. I grab at it.

The doctor says, “I lost it in the war.” He is talking about his thumb.

[Yellow leaves have] fallen
on [white] snow daubed
with [still-green grass].

_____

In the third Augustine translation is a thrum: “For / where / could / my / heart / flee / from / my / heart?” The thrum escaped the darkness of the drum. No “to” this time. The “to” escaped the darkness of the “from.”

Yellow leaves have fallen
on [green grass] daubed
with still-[white snow].

Notes:

Quotation sources, in order of appearance: 1. Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 1991); 2. A misprint of the Chadwick translation, transcribed on an online resource; and 3. Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown with translations by Michael Walsh (University of California Press, 1967).

[This poet is having a chest attack]

• The most Democrat moment in Star Trek Next Generation (I invite you to give me yours)  *Starship Mine* when Picard knocks out bad guys because Starfleet officers don't kill people and leaves them to die in the barian sweep
• Long howl
  
• Winter woods are prettiest, November light is best

• Forgive me, I accidentally deleted a blogroll, the one between Fleabus and Doctor Sevrin, whose ears I have, if you were in that blogroll please email me, if there's a blog or site you regularly read and remember please email me. Please
• I won this fuck up with blaeaeaeager 50.1% - 49.9%, fuck blaeaeaeager
• Fuck too the movie Windows 10 Versus Jeff's Dell XPS, it sucks
  
• 2020 November 15
• Was trying to move someone slumbering to a mortuary, one of the two slumbering who woke to the top deleted the post that floated him, if you rise from the dead but don't want me to mention it please email me even though....
  
• blaaaaagers blogrolling is broken, nothing can be added, the fuck?
• UPDATE: blaaaager forum says: Hello,
  the problem with several widgets (page list, blog list, attribution) is known and has been reported to Blogger. Now we have to wait for the fix.
• if any of you can test on yours and let me know I'd appreciate it

  

• I haven't even told you what I was going to tell you when this post started
• On crackers with covid
• Reminder: Saturday's March of Crackers was about cracker grievances their rights to cracker being infringed
• The Fettermans: The lieutenant governor is adept at baiting boneheaded politicians online, but the Fettermans also have a long history of delivering material results for the Keystone State. Their work resurrecting the old steel town of Braddock — where Fetterman moved to start a GED program and ended up serving as mayor for more than a decade — has provided a blueprint for how to revitalize the Rust Belt’s forgotten burghs. Fetterman enjoyed a “privileged” upbringing in York, Pennsylvania, and planned to take over his father’s insurance business, but the unexpected death of a childhood friend shocked him awake to life’s unpredictable nature. He became involved in Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, and decided to dedicate his life to public service. Years later, the Harvard-educated, six-foot-eight heavily tattooed politician still seems to feel more at home at the steelworkers union hall that sits across the street from the converted auto dealership the Fettermans call home than in a government building, but there are already whispers about him running for higher office in 2022.
• It's not "feminism," it's imperialism in pumps: This word “moderate” which the AP news agency keeps bleating is of course complete nonsense. Standing in the middle ground between two corporatist warmongering parties does not make you a moderate, it makes you a corporatist warmonger. Flournoy is no more “moderate” than the “moderate rebels” in Syria which mass media outlets like AP praised for years until it became undeniable that they were largely Al Qaeda affiliates; the only reason such a position can be portrayed as mainstream and moderate is because vast fortunes have been poured into making it that way.
• Tale of Two Pandemics
• Why do we see dead people 
• Maggie's weekly links
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links
• UPDATE: 2020 November 16

[This poet is having a chest attack]

Clark Coolidge

This poet is having a chest attack
that poet's bones are elsewhere
this poet is a fountain of postage
that poet sees apes throws rocks
poems coming out in bundles
poems carved on slabs
poems burned into the countryside
poems free in cereal boxes
the Lone Ranger poem ring sent for
poems preserved in amber
poems on deed and treaties
poems breathed in with the air
poems charged with crimes
poems with deadly rhymes
poems that make you deaf and blind
poems in the sea on the wind between the stars
poems tacked up in bars
                             their only publication

Floated from the Hearth Sparks Out of My Mouth

I'dv'e bet you a digital pint four months ago the Tuesday a week before Election Day ZANGED! 

McQueen is dead, long live McQueen

No. Do you think Trump knows? Is reading his obituaries?

The simpleton manifesto

My twitter feed tells me as I type this sentence SCOTUS done

Everybody has to draw a line: But you are betting a great deal for yourself and your family if you do not plan and draw red lines: at what point will you leave, if you can? At what point will you start preparing, however you can, to live in a plutocratic theocratic America, knowing it may not happen but that the cost of not preparing is higher than the cost of preparations?

Nothing in the constitution requires nine, the number has changed

Democracy, the musical

Nine will be the number when Harris loses to Hawley in 2024

Jeff types into his self-incriminating machine

The reason I think Trump done beyond my constant scotus yodel

After the digital tornado

Trump must know, Bibi oopsied the clue

Without a warrant

Punch me in the balls when Biden's inauguration speech yodels about reaching across the aisle if you still think this isn't a work

How He Changed Over Time: a new Lydia Davis story for our time (h/t Ed)

So this plan to consolidate past blogs I don't look at and no one is interested in into one huge blog no

UPDATE! 2020 October 27

On motherfucking Democrats: the surest sign Trump's been shitlorded is Biden winking at the shitlords

Jeff, if I don't want to deal with wordpress anymore and want to move pOj to blOOger just do it

Paul Kingsnorth? Anyone read?

Nothing halts me like some small vanity victory, every bad habit happily sloppily returns

50 Greatest Apocalyptic Novels

I write a poem like this. I asked twooter What would be the temperature today if Ginsberg hadn't died?

How societies go backwards

Now that Barrett in if there IS to be a Ratfucking for Trump it starts now

$$$EXPENSIVE MAGIC$$$

Cedar Sigo

 I stumble down        around torn peaks

                          “Fit the right suit

                                                      to trick them all.”

                                         the questions fall

                                   around allure. Poems floated

                           from the hearth

                                                sparks

                                 out the mouth. I am wound up, bored

we are only strangers on our way

the hotel                turned slender to mind

                now written out (sloppy)

                                                to music

                dark brown wood

                                 gold mirrors

                             (tight)

                                 The drinking songs from upper stories

drag us to sleep                 a bend in the basement wall

             unexplained

                              scorched. pulling on clean clothes

                  I let myself out

                                                              walk up

                                                                       underground

                                        to a far off hill

                                                             smoke on top

“The orchestra of the

                           immense magnified

       inner life

                   is now prodigious.”

the strings sound down

             make the surface of a mirror

                                                    & hang the head

                           my forbidden past

                                        Rose & Silk

           the wine is young

                                  The brooks still hum

                                                               with melted snow

In the Dictionary Looking Up the Distinction Between Necessity and Need

• My goddamn free blogging platform made good its autobotted promise to kill the "legacy blaaager" interface which I used until I couldn't
• I'm not going to bitch beyond saying once only, Fuck! my goddamn free blogging platform, and
• (a) if things look different that's why
• (b) I can't set as default that links open in a new window like I could before, I have to check the open in a new window box for each link, forgive me in advance if I miss some, if you're like me you like a new window, if you're like me it feels like cheating for stats to make people back arrow, and
• (a) this will take getting used to, and I've already learned don't enlarge font, don't bullet, don't do shit until you have to because code is a motherfucking snake
• (c) The loaner 2021 Subaru Legacy I'm driving (while my 2013 Subaru Impreza gets recall fixes and new tires and complete realignment) a fucking casino slot machine and yet I can drive it
• (a) >>dB<<
• (d) I am telling you three times, we are being reprogrammed
• Here's Earthgirl's oil still drying Portrait of Dogduck
  

• The theocratic mantra of our age
• How the West lost
• The social logic of climate breakdown
• The Big Smoke
• Assorted deleted motherfucking Democrat links
• Yesterday
• I want to be a real boy, part two
• New book review by Dan: Baring the Contrivance 
  
• Email on my neighborhood's listserv yesterday (I can find someone who'll vouch): We are 4 or 5 youngish seniors who enjoy a fun game of Scrabble about 6 on Saturday evenings. Since we have only one man playing it would be nice to have a second fellow join us.  This is after dinner and w/o beer etc. we are on Parkwood Drive. Send a message if interested. 
  

 

 

 

• Treating American empire   
• Politics in an American industry
• Random barking
• Wordpress just updated their interface too 
• just leave me alone, I'll figure it out
• Avedon Carol's occasional links
• A sketch on globalization and ethnopoetics
• Poetry lessons from the advanced in age
• William Carlos Williams birthday today 
• Richard and Linda
• The dBs song top segment always make me thing of

 ALL SOULS 

Saskia Hamilton

1586

I was in the dictionary looking up
the distinction between necessity
and need, or requirement, “the constraining
power of circumstances.” The dictionary
gives an example from Sidney and Golding:
Of the necessitie that is conditionall,
and not of the necessitie that is
absolute. Sidney met his end one morning
when, writes Greville, by the banks of the IJssel,
an “unfortunate hand” sent forth a bullet
that broke the bone in his thigh.
So great was his thirst, he asked
for drink; but before it touched his lips,
he saw a “poor soldier carried along”
who “ghastly cast his eyes up” at the bottle.
Sidney gave it to him. You, whose
“necessity,” he said, “is yet greater than mine.”
Within weeks, and with the “fixing
of a lover’s thought on those eternal
beauties,” he died in Arnhem on the baker’s street.

2010

Is there point to critical interpretation
that gives us “what we all know already, what
inescapably and instantly strikes
the eye,” as Rosen wrote in June? Then Ricks
asked if Rosen would agree to any
like assertion of a musical phrase
striking the ear? I spent the hours that season
in a basement library magnifying
Bishop’s hand ten times to read the word
“tidal.” On the daily train along
the river, the conductor sometimes returned,
sometimes pocketed, my ticket.
“An interpretation,” Rosen said,
“must either uncover or create a secret.”
“I give you simply what you have already,”
reasoned Lowell. A fine morning.
Steady summer construction
on the avenue stories below.

1947

After the peace, autumn Sunday,
a fine one, smallest child inside, eldest
on a train journey, and he and a friend
in the meadow by the river.
He wore the military duty belt,
the find from the brush that he’d been snapped in
a few days before. They found the tree to climb
and then jumped down this time
onto a mine that had once—though the field
had been swept, they all thought—been laid there
by an unfortunate hand. For sixty years
his face looked up from picture frames
in the houses of their friends. She kept
in her clothes a piece of his skull,
and her thumb would stroke it,
as she had once stroked the fontanelle.

1977

The crow took a cracker and my grandfather
scolded it. Six, drinks under the apple tree,
the foxgloves leaning over flower beds
and down at children sipping juice,
white butterflies among the buddleia
and nettles with their feathery trichomes,
and hover flies in the last uncleared area
where meadow met the garden and lawn, arbor
and house. Amice was the crow’s name, it stepped
sideways, crossed its beak on the bench.
The order of six o’clock: shoulder blades
settling down the back, salt on fingers,
prints on glasses, books closed, their linen covers
warming in the westerly light.

Small Gray Spleen

ON RESORTING TO A 1983
BRUCE COCKBURN SONG
WHILE RESORTING OPTIONS
IN A CLUSTERFUCK

Pjoepf of Vriecyh

Manipulating
best word first line your second
haiku. Aspire

yet not yet not yet
not yet not yet not yet not
yet not yet not yet

• Shitlordism in action
• Protect yourself from political violence in an age of facial recognition and doxxing
• Shitlordism in action
• Motherfucking Democrats
• Inventing non-violence
• Motherfucking Democrats
• Fuck the police
• The case for the Left not supporting Biden
• Occasional aghast wonder-out-loud if crackers really *are* this stupid

• Reflections on Sanders 2020
• Surveillance capitalism, Jeff types into his free gaagle blaaging plaatform
• I want to be a real boy, part one
• 130 Degrees
• Her eighty-six jobs
• Avedon's occasional links
• THIS is not why I don't watch movies & tv but if you do read it
• Pet's probs
• Owls

THE INSIDE OUT MERMAID

Matthea Harvey

The Inside Out Mermaid is fine with letting it all hang out–veins, muscles, the bits of fat at her belly, her small gray spleen. At first her lover loves it–with her organs on the outside, she's the ultimate open book. He can pump her lungs like two bellows and make her gasp; ask her difficult questions and study the synapses firing in her brain as she answers to see if she's lying; poke a pleasure center in the frontal lobe and watch her squirm. No need for bouquets or sad stories about his childhood. He just plucks a pulmonary vein and watches the left ventricle flounder. But before long, she starts to sense that her lover, like all the others before him, is getting restless. This is when she starts showing them her collections–the basket of keys from all over the world, the box of zippers with teeth of every imaginable size–all chosen to convey a sense of openness. As a last resort, she’ll even read out loud the entries from her diary about him to him. But eventually he’ll become convinced she’s hiding things from him and she is. Her perfect skin. Her long black hair. Her red mouth, never chapped from exposure to sun or wind, how she secretly loves that he can’t touch her here or here.

Assassin-Bug Secretion Secretion Assassin-Bug

• If you're reading this you might be a conspiracy theorist
• Reminder: it is entirely possible that the threat of covid is genuinely real and dangerous *and* entirely probable that threat is being vectored by our shitlords to strategically and lavishly leverage their shittiness to increase their net shittiness
• (they often hire Democrats for wet work)
• This was always the plan

• Fuck the surveillance police, Jeff types into his free google blaaaaging platform
• Motherfucking Democrats
• The crackerchrister redemption story
• 'nother test (Ed mentioned on tweeter that wordpress update is fucked too (see above free google blaaaaging platform link)
• Non-conforming
• Seven ways MOCO is changing
• Periwinkle
• Musick to Play in the Dark
• Update! a my bleggalgaze (at wordpress, I was updated without notice)
• New Orders' best deep cuts
• On Jackson Mac Low whose poem below put the song below in my head

  


 
INSECT ASSASSINS
 
Jackson Mac Low

Injects no survive. Efforts control the
Animal survive. Survive. Animal survive. Survive. Injects no survive.
 
In nasty spitting eye cost. This
Assassin spitting spitting assassin spitting spitting in nasty spitting
 
Insectivorous nutriment species encounter Charles to
Are species species are species species insectivorous nutriment species
 
Into notoriety. Sweeping eastern capture testimony
As sweeping sweeping as sweeping sweeping into
notoriety. Sweeping

Interest nervous succumb easily: composed tube
Adhesive succumb succumb adhesive succumb succumb interest
nervous succumb
 
It near spider East closes thorax.
And spider spider and spider spider it near spider
 
Its needle. Specialized enlarged? Cutting tough
A specialized specialized a specialized specialized its needle.
Specialized
 
Is nontoxic secretion extremely contains that
Assassin-bug secretion secretion assassin-bug secretion secretion
is nontoxic secretion
 
I needle-like snake. Enzymes compound TENDON
ANCHORING snake, snake, ANCHORING snake, snake, I
needle-like snake,
 
INLET not significant, effect cockroach. Thus
About significant, significant, about significant, significant,
INLET not significant,
Insect "natural" surround enzyme constituents time
After surround surround after surround surround insect "natural"
surround
 
Internal nerve. Sucks especially contents through.
Against sucks sucks. Against sucks sucks. Internal nerve. Sucks
 
Immediate now share extinguishing controlling them.
Arises: share share arises: share share immediate now share
 
Insecticide? Needs. Sap; episode. Cimicidae thoroughly
Attributed sap; sap; attributed sap; sap; insecticide? Needs. Sap;
 
Insects numbing seconds. Each channels. They.
Accordingly seconds. Seconds. Accordingly seconds. Seconds.
Insects numbing seconds.

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

• So, nevernote again, my eyes
• Not the writing in ink but reading my handwriting the next day 
• You could put a piece of paper with a blank typing keyboard copied in front of me, I could not fill in the alphabet, I type faster with more correctly spelled words than I can handwrite
• This was a required Emergency Jeff Alert System Test
• Jeff succeeded, deleted, something he can't do with inked tortured justification in 5X5 per inch quad re: second bullet (with gourmand ink)
• In high school, 45 years ago, I took a typing class in the new bowels of Trojan High School, same level as the frau's German class, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
• Couldn't then at all much less as flawlessly as just now in two or three seconds, and including this brag, not one accusatory algorithm-generated you're an idiot red squiggle in not more than ten seconds
• Latest flag, first coat

• People suddenly shouting, why doesn't someone do something? about Trump's brazenly forthright declaration he will authorize any action to make voting impossible for anyone he thinks will vote against him
• The Asset Economy
• Escalating plunder
• Orwell and 1619
• Trump's succeeded
• The fallacy of the civic champion
• Woke capitalism
• Shitlords 
• Same old 
• Sinistrously disposed
• Earthgirl has Canadian citizenship through her mom, I could live in Canada, I wouldn't mind being an expat
• Reminder: so boned
• On helmetball as best metaphor for America
• There wasn't a word in English for yellow-red until the fruit reached Europe?
• It may surprise you to know there's new GbV

APRIL SNOW 

Matthew Zapruder 

Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world

is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep

their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred

waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle

when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows

the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings.

I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various

faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t

want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep

I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces

of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings.

I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike

on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

I Could Also Mention the Hopes of Common Spiders

• Bernie's last dance with the Democrats
• Sanders' biggest obstacle is motherfucking Democrats: you can sense their panic, rising like tree sap. As time grows shorter and the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire trend in Bernie’s favor, the Third Way-style Democrats voice increasingly desperate warnings that a party that lost to Trump may be about to make a mistake. The Wall Street set throws more money at Joe Biden; the famous columnists who backed the Iraq war sound the alarm about unelectability; the candidate who lost to a reality television clown joins in the doomsaying. A Hollywood casting agency specializing in budget comedies could not assemble a less credible group of opponents. One of Bernie Sanders’ greatest advantages in the race is that many of the most unlikable hypocrites in America despise him.
• Bill Clinton as president, a reminder
• The graceless ease with which motherfucking professional Democrats maintain a constant -.06% less shittiness to the party of open shittiness, shittier daily, amazes me, I *am* enjoying this more
• Fleabus interlude

• The turdliest human will never fuck off to the sea
• The turdliest human ever is a murderer
• The turdliest human ever and her turdly coutiers 
• Sanders supporters vs Warren supporters
• Connecting the Dots: Greta and the billionaires (important)
• Concession: I know motherfucking professional Democrats just doing their job, "Containment vessels for dissent," someone I read last week called them 
• Hallucination nation: Trump's breaking kayfabe
• Motherfucking centrist Democrats
• Trailblazing (in a brush fire)
• >> Deleted bleggalgaze << (though the book cover is below) (I got Doctor Sevrin ears)

• So yes, my wheel is at Hypermanic station, down spin starting inevitably if not necessarily soon
• I am not alone: People and by people I mean the corporate wing of the Democratic party who think the dreaded Bernie Bros saying pee pee to them online is an affront to order seem to be very concerned about the cause of uniting the party and not being divisive but I don’t know what they mean by that except shut the fuck up and take what you get.
• He is suspicious of conspiracies
• Here's a conspiracy for you: Democrats never wanted Trump convicted
• h/t Charlie for catching me typing *acquited* when I meant *convicted* in above sentence
• Above link from Naked Capitalism's daily links by Lambert, who adds: So, let’s review: From 2006, due primarily to sins of omission or commission by Democrats, Presidents are not accountable for: (1) Fake intelligence leading to war, (2) felonies, (3) war crimes, (4) assassinating US citizens (this is down to the Republicans), and (5) abuse of power. Oh, and (6) epic levels of personal corruption, since Democrats did not impeach Trump over the emoluments clause, setting another precedent. And Sorkin bleats on about “degrading Presidential accountability”? 
• Conspiracy theory: make your own
• DC's professional Left flocks to Google conference (Jeff types into his free google blogging platform)
• Never ever shop at CVS, the helmetball of pharmacies
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links
• 2010s part xylophone moose encumbrance
• The death of tumblr
• Happy palindrome day 02022020 
• I cannot recommend the new Destroyer more than I am recommending it:

                            
FOUR QUESTIONS REGARDING THE DREAMS OF ANIMALS

Susan Stewart

1. Is it true that they dream?
         
      It is true, for the spaces of night surround them with shape and purpose, like a warm hollow below the shoulders, or between the curve of thigh and belly.
      The land itself can lie like this. Hence our understanding of giants.
      The wind and the grass cry out to the arms of their sleep as the shore cries out, and buries its face in the bruised sea.
      We all have heard barns and fences splintering against the dark with a weight that is more than wood.
      The stars, too, bear witness. We can read their tails and claws as we would read the signs of our own dreams; a knot of sheets, scratches defining the edges of the body, the position of the legs upon waking.
      The cage and the forest are as helpless in the night as a pair of open hands holding rain.
   
2. Do they dream of the past or of the future?
    
      Think of the way a woman who wanders the roads could step into an empty farmhouse one afternoon and find a basket of eggs, some unopened letters, the pillowcases embroidered with initials that once were hers.
      Think of her happiness as she sleeps in the daylilies; the air is always heaviest at the start of dusk.
      Cows, for example, find each part of themselves traveling at a different rate of speed. Their bells call back to their burdened hearts the way a sparrow taunts an old hawk.
      As far as the badger and the owl are concerned, the past is a silver trout circling in the ice. Each night he swims through their waking and makes his way back to the moon.
    Clouds file through the dark like prisoners through an endless yard. Deer are made visible by their hunger.
    I could also mention the hopes of common spiders: green thread sailing from an infinite spool, a web, a thin nest, a child dragging a white rope slowly through the sand.
    
3. Do they dream of this world or of another?
    
    The prairie lies open like a vacant eye, blind to everything but the wind. From the tall grass the sky is an industrious map that bursts with rivers and cities. A black hawk waltzes against his clumsy wings, the buzzards grow bored with the dead.
    A screendoor flapping idly on an August afternoon or a woman fanning herself in church; this is how the tails of snakes and cats keep time even in sleep.
    There are sudden flashes of light to account for. Alligators, tormented by knots and vines, take these as a sign of grace. Eagles find solace in the far glow of towns, in the small yellow bulb a child keeps by his bed. The lightning that scars the horizon of the meadow is carried in the desperate gaze of foxes.
    Have other skies fallen into this sky? All the evidence seems to say so.
    Conspiracy of air, conspiracy of ice, the silver trout is thirsty for morning, the prairie dog shivers with sweat. Skeletons of gulls lie scattered on the dunes, their beaks still parted by whispering. These are the languages that fall beyond our hearing.
    Imagine the way rain falls around a house at night, invisible to its sleepers. They do not dream of us.
    
4. How can we learn more?
        
    This is all we will ever know.

I'd Like to Have a Silver Hat Please

• A colleague gave birth earlier this week and the baby died hours later and the news broke my fugue, sounds horrible, is true
• Earthgirl knit a hat in non-gendered colors, bright red with orange ears, for Colleague's new baby since my Colleague and spouse chose (as should you) not to know, two nights ago I texted a photo of the hat to my Colleague not knowing the baby had already died
• She texted back condolences for my new urns but did not mention her born child that died
• Also true: Earthgirl knit a hat for Richard and Aimee's child, the hat orange with bright red ears, years ago
• Richard sent photo of baby in orange hat at angle that obscured the red ears
• Earthgirl, shown photo, like, where are the red ears
• Richard, friend and good guy, sent funny barb back (more than once), photo proving he had not in fact de-eared the hat Earthgirl knit for his child
• I sent photo of hat Earthgirl knit for Colleague's baby to Colleague, hat rolled up and set on a PC left speaker like the hats my Colleague wears and also too what me and Colleague talk about other than work, music
• Colleague thanked me and asked me to thank Earthgirl after Colleague's just born child had died but I didn't know, I showed photo and thank you to Earthgirl, why did I roll the hat up, she asked
• Anyway
• Richard emailed me last night out of the blue, first time in months, a year
• Serendipity
• holyfuck
• broke my fugue

 


 

• Why do we get sad when robots die?
• Civilization v Barbarism
• A new Middle East?
• Motherfucking Christers
• Trump's collaborators
• Motherfucking crackers
• History of American nazi-punching 
• Motherfucking Democrats
• Motherfucking NPR
• I saw and heard a clip of Trump's new Crazy Bernie farts, I am telling you three times internal polling at both the Yankees and Red Sox front offices more pro-Bernie than anyone willing to say out loud
• Avedon Carol's occasional links 
• There have always been gangs in poetry
• I purposely do not have a tag *Serendipity* because jinx
• Poets in the age of surveillance
• I never minded when someone (most likely Elric) put on Rush but never put on Rush myself, but RIP Neil Peart 
• I need type the words *Richard Youngs* here and add the tag *Richard Youngs* to the post's tags since searching *Richard Youngs* on blog brings up none of all the songs I've posted

PERSONAL POEM

Frank O'Hara

Now when I walk around at lunchtime

I have only two charms in my pocket

an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me

and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case

when I was in Madrid the others never

brought me too much luck though they did

help keep me in New York against coercion

but now I'm happy for a time and interested

  

I walk through the luminous humidity

passing the House of Seagram with its wet

and its loungers and the construction to

the left that closed the sidewalk if

I ever get to be a construction worker

I'd like to have a silver hat please

and get to Moriarty's where I wait for

LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and

shaker the last five years my batting average

is .016 that's that, and LeRoi comes in

and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12

times last night outside birdland by a cop

a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible

disease but we don't give her one we

don't like terrible diseases, then

   

we go eat some fish and some ale it's

cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling

we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like

Henry James so much we like Herman Melville

we don't want to be in the poets' walk in

San Francisco even we just want to be rich

and walk on girders in our silver hats

I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is

thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi

and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go

back to work happy at the thought possibly so