Albert Goldbarth - Comings Back

The earth is not round
it goes as far as the highest xylem

Still, certain emblems can permeate
the consciousness of entire generations:
snipers, ecology

oh they have electric mixers
oh they have hot-plates
oh they have a machine
that spins blood
until it separates

most people, after a certain age
don't cry.  They just live
that little bit shorter

we mustn't forget
the eyelids.  Two wings
are all a world needs,
uplifted in its praise every morning.

From the end of the earth, the song is Grind Me Into Dust.

The Old Man at the Wheel

Measured against the immeasurable

universe, no word you have spoken

brought light. Brought

light to what, as a child, you thought

too dark to be survived. By exorcism

you survived. By submission, then making.

You let all the parts of that thing you would

cut out of you enter your poem because

enacting there all its parts allowed you

the illusion you could cut it from your soul.

Dilemmas of choice given what cannot

change alone roused you to words.

As you grip the things that were young when 

you were young, they crumble in your hand.

Now you must drive west, which in November

means driving directly into the sun.

Frank Bidart

American Love Story

Let's go to the mountains. Let's go to the countryside. Katie said let's be careless and make everyone worry. Katie and I took the car to the mountains. We sat on a wooden bench at the top and hung our feet out over America.

A Plan to Reach the North Pole by Balloon

When asked what he would do if his balloon came down in the water with no one around, he said, "Drown."

"It is not a little strange to be floating here above the polar sea," he went on. "To be the first to have floated here in a balloon. How soon, I wonder, shall we have successors? Shall we be thought mad or will our example be followed? I cannot deny that all three of us are dominated by a feeling of pride. We think we can well face death having done what we have done. Isn't it all, perhaps, the expression of an extremely strong sense of individuality which cannot bear the thought of living and dying like a man in the ranks, forgotten by coming generations? Is this ambition?"

          

"Without a skeg a skiff is vicious to row. A skegless skiff wanders about, drifts with the wind, and quickly exhausts the already infuriated rower. A good skeg reaches perhaps six inches below the bottom of the skiff, and as a fixed rudder (or aftermost part of an otherwise nonexistent keel) directs the boat in a straight line.

Of course, a skeg adds draft to a skiff. Add a nice deep skeg to a skiff and it draws a half foot more water, and runs aground that much more frequently. Moreover, a skeg cants a grounded skiff, and if the skiff grounds on rocks or hard sand, the skeg often twists, then splits, and becomes flotsam. To skeg or not to skeg bedevils those who wish to 'skiff' the marshes - to use a verb Shakespeare used, although infrequently - and often the unwise forego skegs."

"Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot."

Cruise Ship Captain: That rock wasn't on my chart

Cherry

Cherry went to the ends of the earth.

Cherry walked the Barrier.

Brave Cherry dared the Winter Journey.

Cherry froze all ten fingers on the first day of the Winter Journey.

Cherry walked in the dark.

Cherry forgot about the difference between night and day.

Cherry walked 130 miles in 100 degrees of frost.

Cherry pulled the sledge.

Cherry, Bowers, and Wilson planned to be away six weeks.

Cherry ever positive built a stone house above Cape Crozier and stayed ten days.

Cherry climbed a hill to read a thermometer.

Cherry was a sailor hero.

Cherry sounded the white surface and found it hollow all around.

Cherry brought six tins of oil on the Winter Journey.

A reindeer bag was home to Cherry.

Cherry walked a cape of snow.

Cherry assembled the blubber stove.

Frozen Cherry listened to his heart beat slow.

IT WAS A LONG WALK HOME
CRUNCHING OVER ALL THOSE
METACARPALS.

"The old Martian names were names of water and air and hills. They were the names of snows that emptied south in stone canals to fill the empty seas. And the names of sealed and buried sorcerers and towers and obelisks. And the rockets struck at the names like hammers, breaking away the marble into shale, shattering the crockery milestones that named the old towns, in the rubble of which great pylons were plunged with new names: IRON TOWN, STEEL TOWN, ALUMINUM CITY, ELECTRIC VILLAGE, CORN TOWN, GRAIN VILLA, DETROIT II."

[RB]

"
And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.


"

Young, smart, and beautiful girls

have formed an Army of Putin

It's a book!

The Soul of Spain

Part III

There is no night life in spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.


PART IV of the same story

After a while there were no bull fights. What the hell no bull fights? No bull fights. No you really can't mean it no bull fights. But there were no bull fights.


Part V follows

We got on a train and went somewhere else.
 
 
 
 
--Ernest Hemingway

James Taylor and The Endurance