notes from the internets

You can't prevent poets and writers from comparing women to flowers in the same way that you can never tell designers to stop bombarding runways with floral maxi dresses when it is time to showcase their spring/summer collections -- considering the name of the season itself implies as such. 1

There is an awful lot of debate still ongoing about the running of the F1 in Bahrain. The pretty odious Bernie Eccelstone , whos hobbies include comparing women to domestic appliances and praising hitler has said that the raging battles for democracy in the state are nothing to do with him. 2

TOO MANY ASSHOLES ON MY FACEBOOK TONIGHT ARE COMPARING WOMEN TO APPLIANCES…

I JUST WANT TO SMACK THEM IN THE FACE!!!I AM NOT LIKE A FRIDGE OR A VACUUM CLEANER, OR A VENDING MACHINE. I AM A FUCKING HUMAN BEING WHO DESERVES MORE THAN YOU WRITING A WITTY CRITICISM OF HOW YOU WANT ‘YO WOMAN’ TO ACT. ESPECIALLY WHEN ONE OF THEM IS A FAMILY MEMBER.

I SOMETIMES WANT TO SCREAM 3

Here's a Georgia Repub, comparing women to pigs, cows, and sheep: "State Rep. Terry England was speaking in favor of HB 954, which makes it illegal to obtain an abortion after 20 weeks even if the woman is known to be carrying a stillborn fetus or the baby is otherwise not expected to live to term. 4

Preibus wasn't comparing women to caterpillars. He was pointing out how rediculous it is to point to poll numbers (rather than actions) as proof this 'war' exists. 5

The authors believe in wild oats and are full of advice for sowing them: comparing women to wines, for instance, they suggest trying "the mellowness of experience" as well as the "exuberance of youth," and the pleasures of oral sex are not neglected. 6

You can't prevent poets and writers from comparing women to flowers....

... a red red rose, maybe?....

(this all written, still, heart in my throat)

all glowing to you

to the young people & the union members & the old people & the vets & etc who crack nuts & who i hope i might have been one had this been then

FABLE

The mountain and the squirrel
Had a quarrel;
And the former called the latter ‘Little Prig.’

Bun replied,
‘You are doubtless very big;
But all sorts of things
and weather
Must be taken in together,

To make up a year
And a sphere.
And I think it no disgrace
To occupy my place.

If I'm not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry.

I'll not deny you make
A very pretty squirrel track;

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.’

Ralph Waldo Emerson

invent the sacred dance

SATURDAY NIGHT

Music is most sovereign because more than anything
else, rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost
soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with
them and imparting grace.
—Plato, The Republic

The cranes are flying ...
—Chekhov












And here it comes: around the world,
In Chicago, Petersburg, Tokyo, the dancers
Hit the floor running (the communal dancefloor

Here, there, at intervals, sometimes paved,
Sometimes rotted linoleum awash in beer,
Sometimes a field across which the dancers streak

Like violets across grass, sometimes packed dirt
In a township of corrugated metal roofs)
And what was once prescribed ritual, the profuse

Strains of
premeditated art,
is now
improvisation,
The desperately new,
where to the
sine-curved
Yelps and spasms of
police sirens outside


The club, a spasmodic feedback ululates
The death and cremation of history,
Until a boy whose hair is purple spikes,

And a girl wearing a skull
That wants to say I’m cool but I’m in pain,
Get up and dance together, sort of, age thirteen.

Young
allegorists,
they’ll mime
motions
Of shootouts,
of tortured ones
in basements,
Of cold
insinuations
before sex

Between enemies, the jubilance of the criminal.
The girl tosses her head and dances
The shoplifter’s meanness and self-betrayal

For a pair of stockings, a scarf, a perfume,
The boy dances stealing the truck,
Shooting his father.

The point is to become a flying viper,
A diving vulva, the great point
Is experiment, like pollen flinging itself

Into far other habitats, or seed
That travels a migrant bird’s gut
To be shit overseas.

The creatures gamble on the whirl of life
And every adolescent body hot
Enough to sweat it out on the dance floor

Is a laboratory:
maybe this
lipstick,
these boots,
These jeans,
these earrings,
maybe if I flip
My hair and
vibrate
my pelvis

Exactly synched to the band’s wildfire noise
That imitates history’s catastrophe
Nuke for nuke, maybe I’ll survive,

Maybe we’ll all survive. . . .

At the intersection of poverty and plague
The planet's children—brave, uncontrollable, juiced
Out of their gourds—invent the sacred dance.

Alicia Ostriker

“Saturday Night” from
The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998.
Copyright © 1998 by Alicia Ostriker.
All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, upress.pitt.edu.

High Wire Venus

OFF A SIDE ROAD NEAR STAUNTON

Some nothing afternoon,
no one anywhere,

an early autumn stillness in the air,

the kind of empty day you fill
by taking in

the full size of the valley
and its layers leading

slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of the country,

if you stand here long enough, you could stay

for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall,

pulls you in, one field at a time,
pasture and fall

meadow, high above the harvest, perfect

to the tree line, then spirit clouds and intermittent

sunlight smoky rain riding the tops of the mountains,

though you could walk until it's dark
and not reach those rains --

you could walk the rest of the day into the picture

and not know why,
at any given moment,
you're there.

Stanley Plumley

Stanley Plumly is the author, most recently,
of "Posthumous Keats:
A Personal Biography"
(Norton, 2008).
All rights reserved.

corporations are not people, my friend

THIS IS A PERSON

THIS IS A PERSON

THIS IS A PERSON

THIS IS A PERSON

THESE ARE PEOPLE!

THESE ARE PEOPLE TOO!

THIS IS A PERSON

And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make.

falls apart in the perfume

THE LEMON TREES

Hear me a moment. Laureate poets
seem to wander among plants
no one knows: boxwood, acanthus,
where nothing is alive to touch.

I prefer small streets that falter
into grassy ditches where a boy,
searching in the sinking puddles,
might capture a struggling eel.

The little path that winds down
along the slope plunges
through cane-tufts
and opens suddenly
into the orchard
among the moss-green trunks
of the lemon trees.

Perhaps it is better
if the jubilee of small birds
dies down, swallowed in the sky,
yet more real to one who listens,
the murmur of tender leaves
in a breathless, unmoving air.

The senses are graced with an odor
filled with the earth.
It is like rain in a troubled breast,
sweet as an air that arrives
too suddenly and vanishes.

A miracle is hushed; all passions
are swept aside. Even the poor
know that richness,
the fragrance of the lemon trees.

You realize that in silences
things yield and almost betray
their ultimate secrets.

At times, one half expects
to discover an error in Nature,
the still point of reality,
the missing link
that will not hold,
the thread we cannot untangle
in order to get at the truth.

You look around. Your mind seeks,
makes harmonies, falls apart
in the perfume, expands
when the day wearies away.
There are silences in which one watches
in every fading human shadow
something divine let go.

The illusion wanes,
and in time we return
to our noisy cities where the blue
appears only in fragments
high up
among the towering shapes.
Then rain leaching the earth.
Tedious,
winter burdens the roofs,
and light is a miser, the soul bitter.

Yet, one day
through an open gate,
among the green luxuriance
of a yard,
the yellow lemons fire
and the heart melts,
and golden songs pour
into the breast
from the raised cornets of the sun.

Eugenio Montale

translated by Lee Gerlach

Copyright © 2002, 2004 Harry Thomas, Handsel Books (an imprint of Other Press LLC).

the hum of bees

.さすが花ちるにみれんはなかりけり
sasuga hana chiru ni miren wa nakari keri


when cherry blossoms
scatter...
no regrets

Issa begins the haiku with the word sasuga: "truly" or "as one might have expected." Here, the first meaning seems to fit. He proposes that, "truly," the cherry blossoms fall to death without regret.

This undated haiku resembles one that Issa wrote in 1821:

miren naku chiru mo sakura wa sakura kana

without regret
they fall and scatter...
cherry blossoms

In a related haiku (1809), he urges the blossoms to trust in Amida Buddha's
saving grace:


tada tanome hana wa hara-hara ano tôri

simply trust!
cherry blossoms flitting
down

"Blossoms" (hana) can denote cherry blossoms
in the shorthand of haiku.1

my yoshino cherry tree outside my bedroom window goes so quickly from blossoms to leaves. when it's newly fully flowered it fills so with bees that the sound of them comes in through my bedroom window, and fills the garden. and as quickly gone, on to other pollen, other trees.

a movie i just saw a bit of, cherry blossoms, says that the cherry blossom festivals, gathered in groups under the landscapes of yoshino cherry trees, are the perfect reminder to all of us of impermanence.

at 60,
it's something one has learned a bit of;
i wonder how much i will have learned
when i am 80.