James Tate, "The Rally"

I found this poem in The New Yorker (7/7/03) and was struck by how...un-New-Yorker-ish it seemed. But the more I read it, and the more I think about it, the more it actually speaks to me. Is it about alienation? About political rhetoric? About religious fervor? All of the above? None? I'll post it, and you tell me what you think. Line breaks have been preserved from the New Yorker printing, since I couldn't be sure they were unintentional.

          There was some kind of rally going on in the
common. Somebody was speaking into a bullhorn to
about three hundred people, who were cheering and
shouting things. I decided to drift over and check
it out. The speaker was saying, "Even my three-year-
old son knows better than to kick a goat." I mingled
with the crowd. A woman yelled, "You got a great big
cherry pie on your head!" And a dozen others said,
"Yes, you do." The man continued, "And then the dog
ate our sofa. Did we kick it? No, we didn't." Someone
shouted, "The saints dropped the ball on that one."
The man said, "I been down there where even the little
birdies fear to roam. I once found an angry viper
in my pocket, but I steered the course. I bonged myself
with a hidden cloud." "And you never lost your way,"
many shrieked. I was working my way toward the front.
The excitement was catching. "If you spit in a burning
skillet, sure, it sizzles, and then it's gone, and what
have you got? You have the memory of the sizzle, but
soon that, too, is gone, and you're poorer than you were
before," he said. "Your duck just sat on a firecracker,"
I cheered. The speaker stopped and tried to locate
the man who had spoken those words. The crowd, too,
was looking around. I acted as though I were looking
also. After a considerable pause, he continued, "Never
before have we witnessed hairy hands with long fingernails
curl around the puffballs of history with such miraculous
dexterity." The people went crazy. They started bumping
one another's foreheads. I was bumping, and getting
bumped. "It was no accident I swallowed an ant this
morning while preparing my remarks for this rally. I
wanted to swallow that ant," he said. People had stopped
bumping, and many of them were wiping away tears.
I had to admit, he was a powerful speaker. "And now we
are on the verge of setting sail the little headache and
the big headache, too, and we can see the fireflies, who
had all but forgotten us, beating their wings like idiot
children coming back from a dull day in the park, and
it is beautiful, can't you see just how marvellous it is?"
he said. "We love the idiot children," someone shouted.
"Fireflies can't drive tractors," another yelled. "What
happened to the pig?" I said. The man next to me looked
disgusted. "There is no pig," he said.

Whatever this poem is about, I can't help but feel that this James Tate fellow really needs to go have a beer with Joe Wenderoth of Letters to Wendy's fame.

Mmmm, wealth and privilege

I wandered around Stanford's campus yesterday just basking in the wealth and privilege I have. I mean, it's not fair that there are haves and have-nots, but it seems almost sacreligious not to appreciate how lucky I am to be a "have".

There are fountains everywhere around here. If you park in the parking lot, your permit can expire and you may not get a ticket (not so, at the State universities!) Everyone looks healthy, and nothing is crowded. All the buildings have shady courtyards with benches and trees. The sun is shining. I am taking a year-long break from the workforce to focus on my education.

I am very very very lucky to be living my life. Just taking a moment and stopping to count my blessings, and they are legion.

Ronald Koertge, "An Infinite Number of Monkeys"

After all the Shakespeare, the book
of poems they type is the saddest
in history.

But before they can finish it,
they have to wait for that Someone
who is always

looking to look away. Only then
can they strike the million
keys that spell

humiliation and grief, which are
the great subjects of Monkey
Literature

and not, as some people still
believe, the banana
and the tire.

*My thanks to Joshua Newman of self-aggrandizement.com for finding and linking to this poem.

This morning

I missed my class this morning because I fucked up setting my alarm - somehow set the clock itself instead so when I woke up at 8, the clock said 14:35.

Consequently typing away at an assignment and having coffee with N instead of being in class. We started having a good-natured little tussle over who has the nicer chair.

Me: Mine reclines for shit. It needs that little lever thing yours has.

Him: Mine's better! I win! Yess! *raises hands in victory salute*

Me: (smugly) No, I win, because I'm a girl, and girls always win.

Him: (scathingly) Yeah, and history would show that.

Ooooh, *ouch*. So much for empirical evidence of gender superiority. For once, I may have to abandon the quantitative approach and go qualitative to support my argument.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, "The Garden of Proserpine"

Here, where the world is quiet,
   Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
   In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest time and mowing,
   A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
   And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
   For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds and barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
   And everything but sleep.

Here life has death for neighbour,
   And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labour,
   Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
   And no such things grow here.

No growth of moor or coppice,
   No heather-flower or vine,
But bloomless buds of poppies,
   Green grapes of Proserpine,
Pale buds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes,
Save this whereout she crushes
   For dead men deadly wine.

Pale, without name and number,
   In fruitless fields of corn,
They bow themselves and slumber
   All night till light is born;
And like a soul belated,
In hell and heaven unmated,
By cloud and mist abated
   Comes out of darkness morn.

Though one were strong as seven,
   He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
   Nor weep for pain in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes,
And well though love reposes,
   In the end it is not well.

Pale, beyond porch and portal,
   Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
   With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love's who fears to greet her
To men that mix and meet her
   From many times and lands.

She waits for each and other,
   She waits for all men born;
Forgets the earth her mother,
   The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
   And flowers are put to scorn.

There go the loves that wither,
   The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
   And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
   Red strays of ruined springs.

We are not sure of sorrow,
   And joy was never sure;
To-day will die to-morrow;
   Time stoops to no man's lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
   With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
   Weeps that no loves endure.



From too much love of living,
   From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
   Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
   Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Then star nor sun shall waken,
   Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of water shaken,
   Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
   In an eternal night.

The Governator-elect

Well, I voted no recall. So did all nine Bay Area counties. It's those fuckers in Orange County and the rest of SoCal and their conservative voting that got us into this fix. I think the next step should be secession. We have North Carolina and South Carolina, North Dakota and South Dakota...I want North California and South California, damnit. Of course, the aforementioned conservative pig-dogs need our water to support their ecologically-inadvisable lifestyles and so it will never come to pass.

Here's Ah-nold, quoted in Studs Terkel's 1980 American Dreams: Lost and Found:

"[America] is the country where you can turn your dream into reality. Other countries don't have those things. When I came over here to America, I felt I was in heaven. In America, we don't have an obstacle. Nobody's holding you back. . . . California is to me a dreamland. It is the absolute combination of everything I was always looking for. It has all the money in the world there, show business there, wonderful weather there, beautiful country, ocean is there. Snow skiing in the winter, you can go in the desert the same day. You have beautiful-looking people there. They all have a tan."

Well, yippee for him, I guess; just sucks to be the rest of us. Why couldn't he run for something he's more suited for, like head of the California Tourism PR Board?

As N said this morning, it's a good thing he can't run for President. PTL for small mercies, I guess.

From the Department of Give Me A Fucking Break

Bumpersticker I saw yesterday on my drive to the grocery store:

"Virgin, Matron, Crone: Goddess Magic All Her Own."

That doesn't even SCAN, people. WTF? "Virgin, Matron, Crone: No Sense of Rhythm," more like. No wonder hippies tend to be such crappy dancers. A two-syllable word before "Crone" would at least solve the structural problem, if not the dippiness issue.

Four by Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt

Moment

A person wakes from sleep
and does not know for a time
who she is, who he is.

this happens in a lifetime
once or twice.
It has happened to you, no doubt.

Some in that moment
panic,
some sigh with pleasure.

How each kind later envies the other,
who must so love their lives.


Button

It likes both to enter and to leave,
actions it seems to feel as a sort of hide-and-seek.
It knows nothing of what the cloth believes
of its magus-like powers.

If fastening and unfastening are its nature,
it doesn't care about its nature.

It likes the caress of two fingers
against its slightly thickened edges.
It likes the scent and heat of the proximate body.
The exhilaration of the washing is its wild pleasure.

Amoralist, sensualist, dependent of cotton thread,
its sleep is curled like a cat to a patch of sun,
calico and round.

Its understanding is the understanding
of honey and jasmine, of letting what happens come.

A button envies no neighboring button,
no snap, no knot, no polyester-braided toggle.
It rests on its red-checked shirt in serene disregard.

it is its own story, completed.

Brevity and longevity mean nothing to a button carved of horn.

Nor do old dreams of passion disturb it,
Though once it wandered the ten thousand grasses
with the musk-fragrance caught in its nostrils;
though once it followed—it did, I tell you—that wind for miles.


Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence rose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.


Tree

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.