Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal
Ack! The original seal was adopted in 1629 after the colony was granted a charter and is, not to put too fine a point on it, fucking racist(that’s right, the Native American is saying “come over and help us”). More proof that Charles I couldn’t do anything right.
The graduate school applications are going in the mail tomorrow. Wish me luck.
“I shall be a clinger to the outside of words all my life.”
-Neville in Woolf’s The Waves
Some guy named Julian Grey did a series of amazingly well-done and appropriate animations for a bunch of Collins poems, including one of my favorites(below). Seriously, check them out- they go at least a little way toward leavening the inedible loaf of Lost fan videos that YouTube has become.
Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
….and the result is somewhere uncomfortably in the middle of the alien/chemo patient/skinhead continuum.
The viewing and distribution of this “Turkey Fryer Safety” video (including the helpful Spanish B-roll) constitute my sole participation in the imminent holiday season.
Who knew that deliciousness had such a price?
(I love that the turkey barely even touches the fryer before the entire thing turns into a GIANT SEARING BALL OF FLAME).
Nostos1
by Louise Glück
There was an apple tree in the yard –
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts –
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
1. “Homecoming” in Greek
GRAND TOTAL: $876
FUCK. ME.
Enough said.
This is long, but worth it. Diane Wakoski is so intense!
Gianna, fall 2006, somewhere on 9th Street
The Hitchhikers
by Diane Wakoski
Fall 2007, Feet on the dash, between Portland and Kansas.
They burn you
like the berries of mountain ash in August,
standing by the road,
clearly defined,
Autumnal brilliant, heads
scorched from waiting
in the sun.
How can
you pass them up?
But you do,
and dream each night of a hell,
where you are a hitchhiker,
and no one will ever stop to pick you up.
Excuses:
I’m a woman alone;
I’m moving all my books;
I need the time for thinking;
One of them might murder me;
but really, it is the look each one gives me
of need,
desperate need,
pick me up, or I’ll fail to reach my goal,
and that need frightens me,
so I look away,
speed on,
dream each night of a mountain ash
with its bunches of orange berries gleaming
like the failures of my life,
burning beautifully on the tree,
Oh, hitchhikers, hitchhikers,
And they remind me
that I drive across country often, looking for your face
in each car I pass,
or which passes me, knowing you would not hitchhike, either,
thinking of the two years I spent with you,
reliving them over and over,
knowing I had everything I wanted,
but like Midas was silent and stiff with the gold I had touched,
felt always as if I had been buried under a ton of diamonds,
still feel the dust of them glinting on me as I drive across country,
my hair sparkling with the brilliance you left,
and those hitchhikers,
reminding me of hell. That I had what I wanted once,
and lost it,
failed, watched myself failing,
still not understanding why I failed,
but knowing I did,
and still passing–65, 75, 85 miles an hour,
those hitchhikers,
burning by the side of the road,
burning
like the berries of the beautiful mountain ash,
burning like my tongue
on fire,
burning me, as I sleep protected in my rings of fire,
the gleaming car which hurtles me through America,
and all I have
is not enough.
Mountain ash, not the ash from out of which a bird
with glinting neck feathers who flies suddenly up on the road
in front of the swift car, would come,
not the ash on the foreheads of holy sinners,
not the ash of immortality.
Ash–a tree, with its berries not the colour of any jewel,
not the colour of blood, but a rare and exceptional colour, given only
to plants,
and I see each one of you,
as I pass on the road,
burning like the autumn berries,
and the beauty makes me pass by quickly.
In my car, is an altar, sacrificial stone and knife,
the tears of blame and understanding,
and blood; all the blood my body has lost;
Oh, hitchhikers, hitchhikers,
you would not want to travel with me.
You would not want to travel with me.
You Fit Into Me
Margaret Atwood
You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
