Eoster

Dangers of the Imagination and Naturalization Office ... and yet, the aesthetic simplicities of the inherited eggs... bringing candy bars to a king like you, Elvis ... Mrs. Porter in the spring... his body is the year ... Reconstructed Aurochs ... our grotesque resurrections of the beautiful (only beautiful, by this point, mourned: human language... the plastic arts, how they orbit the memorized code, the classical tradition we release to the computers, the transmission of the Real ["how dare we be bored?"]): without it, how little sense anything makes, reduced back to the animal gaze, feeding), merely out of not knowing any better... I pray for the day it is fully warm and water flows as easily inside as out...

"At the Gates, he encounters Virgil, who knows of Dante's past sins, yet agrees to guide him through the Nine Circles of Hell. Dante begins his descent at the shores of Hell where the newly damned souls are forced aboard the great ferry of Charon, whom he forces to sail Dante across. After this, Charon is destroyed when Dante tears his head off using a beast-mount"... "almost bears no relation at all to the actual work... might as well be in two different universes..." ...but what about Huck and Jim in the Islamic Republic of Iran? ...


POEM

Tonight the moon was brighter than the lamps
orbiting it, but the lamps were also orbiting
the more-solid trees, the crowds and buildings,
(or were the crowds orbiting the lamps,
and were the trees a part of the crowd?)
and the verse and the speech, ay, the very images
one took in and digested and spat back
from vibrant brain-sap later in the near-silence
on a bright screen, from within the vibrating
cell made out of being as much
an egg or an auricle of dust, somehow
channeling the light, becoming
this picture -- neither orbit nor focus,
while a player in both. Took a long
time to get here: Village Green, telephones
flowing like milk and honey, words upon
words to reuse for the present act
and the next, and the ride towards
the moon on the seashore, listening
to Abbey Road, Her Majesty glowing
over the purring silence, under our regional
endless babble, purling, falling
waters, all over, reweaving till sleep,
and waking up with the pictures
made from its echoes, in the flood
of the returning giant, erecting the forest.



"Great Britain... vast fabric of credit... she has indeed abused... and now stands on a precipice..." ..."The birthplace of the novel... the expansion of a literate bourgeoise eager to read about itself.. individual isolates... comfortable middle class... increase in leisure for reading... debtors' prison... the vertiginous point where I turned back in the rain... I was having trouble staying upright in the wind... bits of gray bone came down on the slope below me, but the dust was caught in the wind and vanished in the blue vault... my tent was disabled"...

Franzen, birds; Nabokov, mothing... the paramecium of the puddle, the gift of light... boat away.................................


"At the camp Virginia found that a neat clearing had been made upon a little tableland, a palisade built about it, and divided into three parts; the most northerly of which contained a small house for herself and her father, another for von Horn, and a common cooking and eating house over which Sing was to preside." --ERB