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5253. Ulgine Barrows - 7/30/2004 11:44:07 AM Seen the pinnacles, climbed the peaks
Easy to breathe up there
Down in the core, it's breathless
Each hot gasp is a luckless fight 5254. wonkers2 - 7/30/2004 10:13:41 PM Calvin Trillin's new book 5255. wonkers2 - 7/31/2004 6:46:49 AM ON TWO MEMBERS OF THE WAR CABINET
DON RUMSFELD MEETS THE PRESS
With condescending smile so tight,
He seems to take a great delight
Explaining to the press this fight,
As if they're kids who aren't too bright.
When wrong he needn't be contrite:
Don't might and arrogance make right?
COLIN POWELL, ALAS
His memory of war was strong.
No Sissy Hawk, he'd fought the Cong.
He knew that bunk on nukes was wrong.
But, still, he chose to go along.
Of him, they'll sing the saddest song.
"But, still, he chose to go along."
November 17, 2003 5256. wonkers2 - 7/31/2004 6:51:54 AM JUST SPECULATINHG
Loos sixties moreals, Gingrich said,
Was where our troub les lay.
The Newt himself was found to have
A tendency to stray.
Rush Limbaugh has been hooked on pills.
While Bennett's hooked on slots.
Do all the right-wing morals police
Have copy books with blots?
Does Falwell have a floozie, say.
Does Ashcroft, you suppose,
Get home from church and swiftly snort
Some white stuff up his nose?
Does Robertson crave demon rum?
Does Cheney make clerks promise
To hide the fact he's rinting tapes
Last viewed by Clarence Thomas?
November 3, 2003 5257. wonkers2 - 7/31/2004 7:32:29 AM [renting tapes]
Trillin's latest book of poetry, "Obviously On He Sails--The Bush Administration in Rhyme," Random House, $12.95, is well worth the money. Trillin is amazing. 5258. wonkers2 - 7/31/2004 8:09:42 AM Erratum: "OBLIVIOUSLY" On He Sails" 5259. Ulgine Barrows - 8/5/2004 3:57:29 PM YOLANDA, YVONNE, VERONICA
There are some tin-foil hat days in this house.
Days when the world beams on into your brain,
you can't make it go away,
yet you'd be lonely without it.
Stop the gigahertz. 5260. Ulgine Barrows - 8/5/2004 4:00:03 PM Let's chalk that one up to an unhealthy relationship. 5261. Ulgine Barrows - 8/5/2004 4:01:51 PM Several friends at once
Can be perfectly healthy
Perhaps 5262. Ulgine Barrows - 8/5/2004 4:06:41 PM Eat, drink and be merry
Tomorrow, you may be dead 5263. tmesis - 8/8/2004 8:21:01 AM sakonige, you clearly have no clue what a parasite is;
I hope you get pancreatitis. 5264. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 8/10/2004 11:34:59 AM FYI Department: The James Salter short story for which I did the fronticepiece, is finally out. 5265. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:06:56 AM One of my favorite poets is Li-Young Lee. His father had been a physician to Mao, political prisoner under Sukarno, and died a blind minister in a ramshackle Pennsylvania town. Lee's poems are suffused with a lyrical quality found in certain books of the Bible, undoubtedly the echoes of his childhood. This is a poem from his most recent collection.
Praise them
The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonished collects
in chill air. Be glad.
They equal their due
moment never begging,
and enter our
wihtout parting day. See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree barer.
Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
Give up what you guessed
about a whirring heart, the little
beaks and claws, their constant hunger.
We're the nervous ones.
If even one of our violent number
could be gentle
long enough that one of them
found it safe inside
our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
who wouldn't hear
what singing completes us? 5266. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:08:06 AM Correction: "It is our own astonishment collects in chill air." 5267. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:23:31 AM It's a somewhat lengthy poem, so I doubt anyone will read it, but it's my favorite poem by Lee.
The City In Which I Love You
And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
and I mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you...
That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain ringing like teeth into the beggar's tin,
or two men jackaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
drag my extinction in search of you...
Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed
synagogues, defended houses of worship, past
newspapered windows of tenements, among the violated,
the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this
storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home, in which I am a guest...
A bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I'm vexed to love you, your body
the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I'd eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don't see me.
My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil. 5268. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:25:00 AM The shadows under my arms,
I promise, are tender, the shadows
under my face. Do not calculate,
but come, smooth other, rough sister.
Yet, how will you know me
among the captives, my hair grown long,
my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon?
In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections,
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?
Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.
Stack in me the unaccountable fire,
bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.
Folded one hundred times and
creased, I'll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I'll achieve you.
But in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,
no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated
by exhaustion and time's appetite, my sleep abandoned
in bus stations and storefront stoops,
my insomnia erected under a sky
cross-hatched by wires, branches,
and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind
jams me in the passageways, doors slam
like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins
past, whizzing its thin tremolo,
a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps
a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.
5269. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:27:17 AM In the excavated places,
I waited for you, and I did not cry out.
In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,
and there was such flight in my breast.
During the daily assaults, I called to you,
and my voice pursued you,
even backward
to that other city
in which I saw a woman
squat in the street
beside a body,
and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face.
That woman
was not me. And
the corpse
lying there, lying there
so still it seemed with great effort, as though
his whole being was concentrating on the hole
in his forehead, so still
I expected he'd sit up any minute and laugh out loud:
that man was not me;
his wound was his, his death not mine.
and the soldier
who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette:
he was not me.
And the ones I do not see
in cities all over the world,
the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those
in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out teeth:
they are not me. Some of them are
my age, even my height and weight;
none of them is me.
The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked,
the ones who don't survive,
whose names I do not know;
they are not me forever,
the ones who no longer live
in the cities in which
you are not,
the cities in which I looked for you. 5270. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:27:46 AM The rain stops, the moon
in her breaths appears overhead.
the only sound now is a far flapping.
Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic or other
gallops like water on fire to tear itself away.
If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos,
it's only because I'm famished
for meaning; the night
merely dissolves.
And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.
Is prayer, then, the proper attitude
for the mind that longs to be freely blown,
but which gets snagged on the barb
called world, that
tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer
would I build? And to whom?
Where are you
in the cities in which I love you,
the cities daily risen to work and to money,
to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?
Morning comes to this city vacant of you.
Pages and windows flare, and you are not there.
Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk,
wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry,
and you are gone.
You are not in the wind
which someone notes in the margins of a book.
You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots
where human figures huddle,
each aspiring to its own ghost.
5271. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:27:56 AM Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face,
a leafless sapling stands in mud.
In its branches, a nest of raw mouths
gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat.
My hunger for you is no less than theirs.
At the gates of the city in which I love you,
the sea hauls the sun on its back,
strikes the land, which rebukes it.
what ardor in its sliding heft,
a flameless friction on the rocks.
Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received,
quarrelsome with aliases,
intricate with misguided journeys,
by my expulsions have I come to love you.
Straight from my father's wrath,
and long from my mother's womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who's experienced
neither heaven nor hell,
my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter
the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.
- Li-Young Lee
5272. tmesis - 8/16/2004 8:31:52 AM The prior poem was prefaced with a verse from the Song of Songs, which Lee has said is his favorite poem:
I will arrive now, and go
about the city in the streets,
and in the broad ways I will seek ...
whom my soul loveth.
Song of Songs 3:2
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