First day in new house:
nothing found in cabinets
web is all the same.
The Dream of Being Pulled Over While Thinking About a Poetic Idea
is in turn pedestrian and incoherent until I admit what I was doing.
I’ve rejected making a joke about the Affair of the Fourteen
confrontational, obscure
and the NPR podcast I heard about the rhyming police blotter in New Hampshire
cops seem to hate hearing about how it is up north
“Well, what was the poem?” he says, having swept my car with the flashlight
for guns, pot, notebooks – coming up empty.
“Well, as of now it’s:
blue light like the man
coming to tell me take it
easy in the moment.”
“That’s one too many syllables,”
he sighs, handing me my license.
“Slow it down, and replace
‘in the moment’ with something
that’s not a cliche.”
Levels of Abstraction
Is This Glass Half Empty, Half Full, or Twice as Large as it Needs to Be?
is the question on a Volvo passing me at ninety,
while I’m running at the speed limit,
tailgated by a truck with a cross on the rear-view.
The Volvo also tells me, quickly, that the owner’s son
Is an Honor Student at Something Middle School,
something impressive, I’m sure, but the tailgater
has passed me, showing that he
Stands Up for something
and Yeah, it’s Got a Hemi.
We’re all three doing philosophy
at different levels, I suppose,
my bumper blank of opinion.
The Dream of Watching The Social Network with Mark Zuckerberg
The Dream[1] of Watching The Social Network with Mark Zuckerberg
He grimaces at the opening scene
A little too close to home he admits
but the girlfriend[2] isn’t real; an amalgam
of various tropes and a wish-fulfillment
curse placed on him by a few ex-friends,
although there really is a Facebook profile of her
public figure, and only created after the movie came out.
Continue reading “The Dream of Watching The Social Network with Mark Zuckerberg”
Kölner Dom Domfenster
“Found” Line-sestina: Cologne Cathedral’s Stained Glass Window, Gerhart Richter, 2007
It could have well been placed in a mosque or a synagogue.
– Cardinal Meisner, archbishop of Köln, objecting to the commission of the window. Continue reading “Kölner Dom Domfenster”
Clark Kent
The decision as to what your career is to be is a very deep and important one,
and it has to do with something like a spiritual requirement and commitment.
– Joseph Campbell
As I grow older, I see this as his greatest feat:
balancing the day job with his career as superhero.
Rebooting the Justice League
[W]e’re sort of shortening and simplifying the backstory so that new readers can jump in and understand what’s going on from the very first issue. – Jim Lee, DC Comics, in an NPR interview about starting several of the issues over.
It’s an understandable sentiment
wanting to start all over again
when you’re painted into a corner
and the story has gotten too complex.
I Don’t Know How It Can Be this Hot and Not Rain
I’m sitting in this motel room
with a notebook and a pen,
writing angry notes
to God and Angelina.
I don’t know where I can send them off
so I guess I’ll tear them up
and the whiskey contains all the proof I need.
It’s heading south tonight on a northbound train.
And I don’t know how it can be this hot and not rain.
What We Gain in Translation
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Epigram from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot,
originally from Dante’s Inferno, canto xxvii
i)
forgiveness for the language:
scratches for the trouble of trying
to arrive at the same place by a different way
when the first way was also choked with thorns. Continue reading “What We Gain in Translation”
The Dream of Quoting Wendell Berry at the Rotary Club Meeting
During her speech, the nutritionist had said
we can only begin with where we are
speaking of a gradual reduction of fried chicken in our diet
When question time came I rose and asked:
Were you consciously evoking Wendell Berry’s
line we can only begin with what has happened
As she nervously nodded I expressed relief:
because the whole time you’ve been talking
I’ve been thinking about those rural deaths, those
chest clutching spasms leading to a Country Funeral –
here I paused for recognition which didn’t come
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