The world makes little sense, which is to say that it constantly exceeds understanding.
The grass has that sandpapered look and by it you know it is no longer summer.
who put these angles in usyes angleswe attend to their impossibilities that they become
if not possible, light-legible, which bear load
Precisely a week ago, a stop sign at the intersection of Jefferson and Polk was painted green.
The crime was not a case of simple vandalism. Rather, it was part of an experiment by the person who called it in, a local amateur psychologist who is exploring the nature of incongruity.
The Rachel stands tuned to multiplicities, aslant in a territory of longing, where she becomes foreign.
What has she found? She listens, acknowledges another sound, diffuse, multiple, pulsing thought, oscillations, whisperings, never only one.
I had yet to discover the source of that star, it came and it passed but from where it sprang and then fell to fading remained a mystery. In cycling its light lent its powers to coloring my tablecloth a lighter shade, relieving pigment from its duty to darken, except for those spots where I placed my bottles and cups, shielding only parts of the piece from fading, threads left closer to their original hues hewed to others abandoned as wraiths to their fates, a darker ring the mark of those who stayed behind.
Where the trees blackened, I saw,
Quickly, three deer lean into goldenness.
It seems, although wildfires rage
Out of control, this world remembers
Some portion of its first purposes:
Superfluous beauty
Keith Waldrop will long be remembered for his kindness as a man, for his generosity of spirit, for the nuanced beauty and disarming simplicity/complexity of his poetry and translations, for his tireless work with Rosmarie Waldrop at their influential Burning Deck Press, and for his inspiring and magical (for Keith was purest magic) presence in the lives of his friends, fellow writers, students, anybody who was lucky enough to know him.
The postmortem simulations are designed to prep the soul in the art of travel. The goal here is to navigate certain archetypal features that serve as doorways between worlds. Rivers, tunnels, bridges, stairs, tubes, pits, warrens, graves, and environments that resemble sewers all recur in multiple iterations.
… “The Egyptians were aware of how disorienting the underworld is,” Quarrington says. “According to some of their fables, the deities created it like this to eliminate souls who are not properly initiated. It’s not enough to survive into the realm beyond death. We want to bring our consciousness with us.”
Early mint. Intimate. Lace of now leaves now in spirit. As infinite as if. In spirit within. Is now.
New. Is new glorious. Daylight embracing that shade of late
morning. Your every last minor design for which. Only
let therefore eternal loss offer. Ecstatic decline.
The plan was simple: to get from here to there.
But there were obstacles. The first was that he had two children, two daughters, six- and nine-year-olds, to get into the car—which he supposed wasn’t so much an obstacle as the plan he’d been planning for nine years and nine months. There were other obstacles like traffic, and specific needs for specific caffeine delivery systems, and a nine-tenths empty tank of gas he’d intended to fill. And yet none of those obstacles were the obstacle.
The obstacle was that he was 44 years old and a little before midnight he’d eaten way too big a gummy, and now he couldn’t feel his toes or tongue.
Edward Gorey to Consuelo Joerns:
Our behaviour to one another is most of the time venemous and peculiar, and, infrequently, overly kind and considerate but still peculiar.
From “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense” by Stephen Schiff, The New Yorker, 1992:
“I thought I was in love a couple of times, but I rather think it was only infatuation. It bothered me briefly, but I always got over it…. I realized I was accident-prone in that direction anyway, so the hell with it.”
Sometimes there’s a secret room— my daughter is one, I think.
She is infinitely regressive. Every night she says I love
you even more until I stop saying it back.
The idea that we are not our own
is as old as words allow us to think it.
I recalled the early days of the glacier, its slow advancement from uneven patches of ice confusing scientists until becoming a fat, white tongue thickening in the dried-out lake bed, and how for so long we had resigned ourselves to the emptiness that comes with extinction, no longer hopeful of rewilding, no longer sunbeams in Sunday school singing praises but chanting under our breaths Jesus wants me for a catastrophe that we surrendered to the glacier’s demands willingly and without question. If Miss Z had indeed walked out into the glacier it was nothing exceptional. Every day of my childhood men and women wandered silently into its emptiness. And the glacier grew whiter and thicker.
I’ve been snorkeling in this river for sixteen years now and documenting a small stretch of it for about thirteen. Once a week, year ‘round, regardless of the weather, I will swim for several hours, picking up trash as I go, but mostly photographing what I find—fish and turtles, plants and rocks, even the contours of the riverbed, which change depending on the flow. Based on John Burroughs’ maxim—“To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday”—I decided a long time ago to focus on the half-mile reach that runs from City Park, through Sewell Park, and on to the spillway below Spring Lake.
I dream the master tells me: for poetry you need meter, meaning and lust
This sounds plausible enough I am attentive to the master I write her dictum in my small black notebook
But all the informal pronouns have been discarded littering the streets
To survive sadly is still. At a boat’s bottom, allegedly a boat. Allegedly an anchor. Allegations of a law. Oh splinters that split us, oh those who spit on our black gaberdine. The skin rolls the water off. That is what ash is, actually. Accumulation of spittoons and the water’s detritus.
Hump day is a whale, freer than us even in capture, even in tallow. No one said: this isn’t a whale, even as they strung it up to cut its meat. No one said: this is something tbd. They said: mammal, leviathan, child of god, named by Adam.
We got a new name. Something made up. We managed to live. In that hole name.
He’s been coming around a lot but I’ve only recently started calling the dog Jesus because if Jesus were to return, this is how he would do it. In this shape, in this form, in these times. I’m sure of it. My best and only friend, Holy Amy, who thinks of herself as a kind of very powerful and sexually budding nun, disagrees. She says Jesus would return in the form of a handsome kisser, not some ugly mutt. Someone with a beautiful face, so we would know it was him. I say he’s not ugly. She says I am “vexed,” “cursed,” and that I am doomed to repeat the mistakes of those before me, though I’m not sure whom she’s talking about. All I know is it’s true: he’s not ugly. The dog suit he wears isn’t even a dog suit.
When the Reverend Houston was seventy he was retired from the ministry with a pension, paid by the national church organization, that was slightly in excess of the salary he had been receiving for nearly fifty years from his parish at New Babylon, Missouri. There were no strings attached to this pension. He could do with it and with himself, thereafter, practically anything that pleased his rational fancy. Naturally enough, he quit preaching. He had been preaching for nearly fifty years and he was getting just as tired of it as his congregation was. One Sunday morning during the summer of his seventieth year he shook hands with his successor, a vigorous young man who would attract plenty of spinsters to the Sunday-school faculty, walked calmly out of the church and never returned.
He walked for two years across the putrid surface of the solid crust: he learned how not to die by gnawing on it and how not to dissolve in its salt at night; he healed his own bones when the wind whipped him through the air like a rag and flung him onto the stiff waves. He was perpetually dazzled by the glare, but every once in a while he glimpsed shadows beneath the crust, brooding their bodies from one side to another and bashing themselves against the surface. Once he caught sight of an old man, inexplicably gleeful, jigging from one little plastic islet to the next. They waved at each other, arms aloft; he managed to make out the other man’s silhouette, stretched tall against the glare of the crust, and at that precise moment an enormous, jagged mouth rose up around the old man’s feet and carried him down to the depths of that filthy chowder.
