Here's the Long Fin Killie/Bows cascade I've been threatening. Because fine metaphors always abound, the SCOTUS Bowl and the post-game wrap-up and the post-Deracho powerlessness both serve emblematically for my scowling malaise here, there, everywhere, sorry for putting that McCartney song in your head, but it's in mine. Have I mentioned that in the midst of eye-slumps and heart-slumps and soul-slumps and general damn-slumps, my ears have never been better? Some may disagree. Here, have this Long Fin Killie song:
- Yes, horrible youtube, but that's my favorite Long Fin Killie song, please play it loud and fine metaphors abound.
- His generation's greatest academic fraud (as always, I say this with genuine admiration) zizeks himself in a Zizekian defense of Zizek! I consider myself undefinable in ways beyond your comprehension too, for what that's worth, as do you you too.
- The myth of the toothless president.
- Obamacarelessness.
- Fixing healthcare good.
- The movement for involuntary complexity.
- Yes, look at those blogrolls, Blog Days of Summer.
- A Schuyler of urgent concern. Saw that this morning at ::wood s lot::, which you should bookmark or RSS, eihdfmw. Serendipitously, I checked in a copy of Schuyler's Collected Poems a week or so ago, it's sitting on my desk.
- Understatements.
- Live blogging Marmington Fissouri.
- The Millions list of upcoming books includes a new volume of Seidel poems and novels by Stephen Dixon, William Vollmann (a Seven Dreams!), Mark Danielewski, and William Gass! but no Ishiguro.
- Minor poets, major works.
- Blur never mwahhed me, but if you, here's two new Blur songs.
- What you can buy me for my birthday.
- Listening to Bows reminds me of Flunk, but that's another cascade.
BURIED AT SPRINGS
James Schuyler
I
There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much. A launch draws
two lines of wake behind it
on the bay like a delta
with a melted base. Sandy
billows, or so they look,
of feathery ripe heads of grass,
an acid-yellow kind of
goldenrod glowing or glowering
in shade. Rocks with rags
of shadow, washed dust clouts
that will never bleach.
It is not like this at all.
The rapid running of the
lapping water a hollow knock
of someone shipping oars:
it’s eleven years since
Frank sat at this desk and
saw and heard it all
the incessant water the
immutable crickets only
not the same: new needles
on the spruce, new seaweed
on the low-tide rocks
other grass and other water
even the great gold lichen
on a granite boulder
even the boulder quite
literally is not the same
II
A day subtle and suppressed
in mounds of juniper enfolding
scratchy pockets of shadow
while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump—
stands shadowless in an overcast
of ripe grass. There is nothing
but shade, like the boggy depths
of a stand of spruce, its resonance
just the thin scream
of mosquitoes ascending.
Boats are light lumps on the bay
stretching past erased islands
to ocean and the terrible tumble
and London (“rain persisting”)
and Paris (“changing to rain”).
Delicate day, setting the bright
of a young spruce against the cold
of an old one hung with unripe cones
each exuding at its tip
gum, pungent, clear as a tear,
a day tarnished and fractured
as the quartz in the rocks
of a dulled and distant point,
a day like a gull passing
with a slow flapping of wings
in a kind of lope, without
breeze enough to shake loose
the last of the fireweed flowers,
a faintly clammy day, like wet silk
stained by one dead branch
the harsh russet of dried blood.
