I Am the Snouted Creature That Bites Through Anything, Root, Wire, or Can

Always with the Theme Songs. Long-timers here can vouch that the bottom live song has been Theme Song of a Month more than any other song. Also too, here, this shitty blog's back-up and archive renamed and reworked to display history of this blog in images - gifs working - plus a favorite poem (probably the poem posted here most often) and futile second use of a tag.







MOLY

Thom Gunn

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.

I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?

Leathery toad that ruts for days on end,

Or cringing dribbling dog, man’s servile friend,

Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat,

Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat:

Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea.

What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me.

    These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.

No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.

Into what bulk has method disappeared?

Like ham, streaked. I am gross—grey, gross, flap-eared.

The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.

My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature

That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.

If I was not afraid I’d eat a man.

Oh a man’s flesh already is in mine.

Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine.

    I root and root, you think that it is greed,

It is, but I seek out a plant I need.

Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy,

To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:

Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot,

From milky flower to the black forked root.

From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin

And human title, putting pig within.

I push my big grey wet snout through the green,

Dreaming the flower I have never seen.

Born Eighty-Four Years Ago Today

CONSIDERING THE SNAIL

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.


MY SAD CAPTAINS

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all

the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.


YOKO

All today I lie in the bottom of the wardrobe
feeling low but sometimes getting up
to moodily lumber across rooms
and lap from the toilet bowl, it is so sultry
and then I hear the noise of firecrackers again
all New York is jaggedy with firecrackers today
and I go back to the wardrobe gloomy
trying to void my mind of them.
I am confused, I feel loose and unfitted.

At last deep in the stairwell I hear a tread,
it is him, my leader, my love.
I run to the door and listen to his approach.
Now I can smell him, what a good man he is,
I love it when he has the sweat of work on him,
as he enters I yodel with happiness,
I throw my body up against his, I try to lick his lips,
I care about him more than anything.

After we eat we go for a walk to the piers.
I leap into the standing warmth, I plunge into
the combination of old and new smells.
Here on a garbage can at the bottom, so interesting,
what sister or brother I wonder left this message I sniff.
I too piss there, and go on.

Here a hydrant there a pole
here's a smell I left yesterday, well that's disappointing
but I piss there anyway, and go on.

I investigate so much that in the end
it is for form's sake only, only a drop comes out.

I investigate tar and rotten sandwiches, everything, and go on.

And here a dried old turd, so interesting
so old, so dry, yet so subtle and mellow.
I can place it finely, I really appreciate it,
a gold distant smell like packed autumn leaves in winter
reminding me how what is rich and fierce when excreted
becomes weathered and mild
but always interesting
and reminding me of what I have to do.

My leader looks on and expresses his approval.

I sniff it well and later I sniff the air well
a wind is meeting us after the close July day
rain is getting near too but first the wind.
Joy, joy,
being outside with you, active, investigating it all,
with bowels emptied, feeling your approval
and then running on, the big fleet Yoko,
my body in its excellent black coat never lets me down,
returning to you (as I always will, you know that)
and now
filling myself out with myself, no longer confused,
my panting pushing apart my black lips, but unmoving,
I stand with you braced against the wind.

Theme Song August 2013

             
It's true: I've a beginning of the semester bad mood and I was toying with the idea of naming the permalink something along the lines that could cost me my job (then chickened out), but I never intended to close comments and have no recollection of doing so. Open now.

As long as I'm here have a Dead Can Dance song plus: Thom Gunn's birthday is day after tomorrow so Gunn poems today, tomorrow, day after:


MOLY

Thom Gunn

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.

I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?

Leathery toad that ruts for days on end,

Or cringing dribbling dog, man’s servile friend,

Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat,

Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat:

Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea.

What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me.

    These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.

No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.

Into what bulk has method disappeared?

Like ham, streaked. I am gross—grey, gross, flap-eared.

The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.

My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature

That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.

If I was not afraid I’d eat a man.

Oh a man’s flesh already is in mine.

Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine.

    I root and root, you think that it is greed,

It is, but I seek out a plant I need.

Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy,

To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:

Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot,

From milky flower to the black forked root.

From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin

And human title, putting pig within.

I push my big grey wet snout through the green,

Dreaming the flower I have never seen.

He Wore It to Assert, with Fierce Devotion, Complicity and Nothing More

So, Bleggal Year 2013-2014. Look at those blogrolls - even by past standards of Blog Days of Summer slowdown, Blegsylvania is dead. Oh well, this is my preferred method of self-aggrandizement: I use twitter, I don't want to be twitter; I tried tumblr, if I can't count how much I'm ignored, fuck that. I am also, apparently, the oldest dope in Blegsylvania, yes, it's a weekend during the Blog Days of Summer but NOBODY I've seen has mentioned the death of Jean Stapleton, All in the Family and Edith Bunker major cultural touchstones once upon a time, youngsters. Dealing with information overload? Peeping Thomism. Maggie's weekly links. Overlay. Why we should care about Occupy Gezi. Hey, I was watching footage Turkish riots & police response, was reminded me how bigoted I am to once have believed that Turkish cops act more barbarian than US cops. New Inquiry's Sunday links. Don't demonize me, bro. Poetry trading cards? Sylvia Plath reads fifteen of her poems. { feuilleton }'s weekly links. A PDF of Muriel Spark's Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Iconography. Crime fiction and capitalist society. How word verification works. The library and its uses. Stephin Merritt interview, talks Future Bible Heroes. And study them one afternoon before they wilted.






BLACK JACKETS

Thom Gunn

     In the silence that prolongs the span
Rawly of music when the record ends,
     The red-haired boy who drove a van
In weekday overalls but, like his friends,

     Wore cycle boots and jacket here
To suit the Sunday hangout he was in,
     Heard, as he stretched back from his beer,
Leather creak softly round his neck and chin.

     Before him, on a coal-black sleeve
Remote exertion had lined, scratched, and burned
     Insignia that could not revive
The heroic fall or climb where they were earned.

     On the other drinkers bent together,
Concocting selves for their impervious kit,
     He saw it as no more than leather
Which, taut across the shoulders grown to it,

     Sent through the dimness of a bar
As sudden and anonymous hints of light
     As those that shipping give, that are
Now flickers in the Bay, now lost in night.

     He stretched out like a cat, and rolled
The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue,
     And listened to a joke being told:
The present was the things he stayed among.

     If it was only loss he wore,
He wore it to assert, with fierce devotion,
     Complicity and nothing more.
He recollected his initiation,

     And one especially of the rites.
For on his shoulders they had put tattoos:
     The group's name on the left, The Knights,
And on the right the slogan Born To Lose.

Infinite Finitude

         
So I moused twice for WFMU this marathon, once early then once again when Yo La Tengo, for the eighteenth straight year, played three hours of requests in exchange for donations. I asked them to play their favorite Guided by Voices song (I am curious what it is) but they never got to it. No big deal, I think, they got hundreds of requests. Saturday, I get this email:

Hey Jeff,

   When we were cleaning up the mess we made of the Berlin studio at 5 pm German Standard Time, there was band-wide dismay when we uncovered your generous pledge that somehow was overlooked amid the chaos.  We all hope you'll accept our apology.  We hate to let any request go unacknowledged (that's why they invented medleys), and especially a Mouse.

Ira, Georgia and James

Love. Also love for WFMU, which made their goal. If you gave, thanks.

• Barbarian Rhapsody.
• State of Play, Spring 2013.
• Even Democratic loyalists?
• Of course it is. Something I debate: how often do I yodel the same point here? For instance, for all my bitching and moaning about the surveillance state, no one contributes more to my surveillance than me. I post on internet, I pay my bills on internet, I use a cell phone, my cell phone has a GPS.
• Cops are here to protect you, cont.
• On Steubenville and ruining promising lives.
• The assholes of CNN.
• Predators of the First Amendment.
• The point of intersection.
• The Litany Against Beers.
• Idea for a movie.
• His Generation's Greatest Academic Fraud writes soft-porn for Abercrombie & Fitch.
• Is Francis a fraud?
• I know nothing about the crisis is Cyprus. Here's Yves w/background.
• Capitalism, Fuckface Hiatt's rag, morality.
• Tactics for the revolution of everyday life.

• The New Inquiry's awesome Sunday link aggregation.
• The Honest Courtesan's awesome link aggregation.
• davidly's 500th post.
• Silver Line.
• Things I had forgotten: beets are yummy, especially roasted, and beets turn your piss pink.
• Anyone have an opinion on Feedly?
• On Philip Roth.
• The inscrutable brilliance of Anne Carson. I need investigate.
• Listen to Finnegan's Wake.
• Glück, for those of you who do.
• The letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer.
• Babbitt, for those of you who do.
• Randal's latest playlist.
• darkblack's Weekend Overnight.
• Mining the audio motherlode.

THE ANNIHILATION OF NOTHING

Thom Gunn

Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name

That nightly I rehearsed till led away

To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.

In this a huge contagious absence lay,

More space than space, over the cloud and slime,

Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.

Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,

Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,

And welcomed zero as a paradigm.

But now it breaks—images burst with fire

Into the quiet sphere where I have bided,

Showing the landscape holding yet entire:

The power that I envisaged, that presided

Ultimate in its abstract devastations,

Is merely change, the atoms it divided

Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.

Only an infinite finitude I see

In those peculiar lovely variations.

It is despair that nothing cannot be

Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark

Of dread.

               Look upward. Neither firm nor free,

Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.

Lapping Like a Cloak of Chaos

CONSIDERING THE SNAIL

Thom Gunn

The snail pushes through a green

night, for the grass is heavy

with water and meets over

the bright path he makes, where rain

has darkened the earth’s dark. He

moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring

as he hunts. I cannot tell

what power is at work, drenched there

with purpose, knowing nothing.

What is a snail’s fury? All

I think is that if later

I parted the blades above

the tunnel and saw the thin

trail of broken white across

litter, I would never have

imagined the slow passion

to that deliberate progress.

I was going to write about standard shit, but fuck that. I was going to write about my baseball apostasy seventeen years ago after thinking about the death of Earl Weaver and the rise of the Nationals and the return of baseball itches, and double-fuck that. I was going to write about my neverending years at Blegsylvania's Stringtown Junior High School, and triple-fuck that. I was going explore in some detail the phenomenon that setting up a what-the-fuck second blog diminishes what-the-fuckness there, increases it here (which is the why I set up these off-shore what-the-fuck laundromats), but quadruble (sic) fuck that. I was going to mention that blogging the middle day of a three day weekend which happens to be Helmetball's biggest day of the year is quintuply stupid, and I just did. I do want to say that when blogfriend and fellomocomofo Jim (@UOJim) tweeted (he has a blog but only posts when on post-surgery narcotics, which, fortunately for him, unfortunately for us, is very infrequently and hopefully stays that way): Sad a fine poet died of substance abuse, but impressed despite myself Thom was doing meth at age 75. #GunnAppreciationDay I panicked, rushed to wikipedia, I was sure January 19 wasn't Gunn's birthday, confirmed it isn't, then tweeted back: January 19 is Thom Gunn Appreciation Day? What a fucking dope on so many fucking levels. I responded weakly to Jim's kind poke of doh: Ah. And everyday is Thom Gunn Appreciation Day. Though everyday is Thom Gunn appreciation day, so Thom Gunn poems and songs. But yes, you can have some links: Enough-is-enoughism. Fighting the scourge of giant marshmallows. If true, credit due? Boatload of links. Hitchens: from socialist to neo-con. Is Jon Steward turning on his fan base? Wanna go for a walk? Fresh and vacuum-packed. Chatter Tones. darkblack's Weekend Overnight. Yo La Tengo setlist, w/video, includes new Grateful Dead cover!




MY SAD CAPTAINS

Thom Gunn

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all

the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.




       
THE DUMP

Thom Gunn

He died, and I admired
the crisp vehemence
of a lifetime reduced to
half a foot of shelf space.
But others came to me saying,
we too loved him, let us take you
to the place of our love.
So they showed me
everything, everything--
a cliff of notebooks
with every draft and erasure
of every poem he
published or rejected,
thatched already
with webs of annotation.
I went in further and saw
a hill of matchcovers
from every bar or restaurant
he'd ever entered. Trucks
backed up constantly,
piled with papers, and awaited
by archivists with shovels;
forklifts bumped through
trough and valley
to adjust the spillage.
Here odors of rubbery sweat
intruded on the pervasive
smell of stale paper,
no doubt from the mound
of his collected sneakers.
I clambered up the highest
pile and found myself
looking across not history
but the vistas of a steaming
range of garbage
reaching to the coast itself. Then
I lost my footing! and was
carried down on a soft
avalanche of letters, paid bills,
sexual polaroids, and notes
refusing invitations, thanking
fans, resisting scholars.
In nightmare I slid,
no ground to stop me,

until I woke at last
where I had napped beside
the precious half foot. Beyond that,
nothing, nothing at all.