Intermeshed

I discovered
long ago
in collecting and classifying marine animals

that what I found was
closely intermeshed with
how I felt at the moment.

External reality has a way of being
not so external
after all.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

Elegy for the Southern Drawl - Selection

It is all dying out now in a voice asking,
"Where you from? How ya'll folks doin'?"
On the blank verse of the forklift man,
From way off down there and yonder,
Is draining, thou and thine, from prayers
Of spinsters in the Nazarene Church --
Is dying of knowledge of the world,
But still going, barely, in a grunted "hidey"
In the line at the cash register at Shoney's,
A father telling how he came north
To visit his son, impatience starting up
Its coughs behind him, his yes'ms and no'ms
An impediment here, Confederate money.
Kid's in my office, slow-talking. I ask,
"Where you from" He doesn't seem to want
To say, thinks again, then does. "All over."

 -- Rodney Jones, Elegy for the Southern Drawl
(selection)

Once below a time

I

Once below a time,
When my pinned-around-the spirit
Cut-to-measure flesh bit,
Suit for a serial sum
On the first of each hardship,
My paid-for slaved-for own too late
In love torn breeches and blistered jacket
On the snapping rims of the ashpit,
In grottoes I worked with birds,
Spiked with a mastiff collar,
Tasselled in cellar and snipping shop
Or decked on a cloud swallower,

Then swift from a bursting sea with bottlecork boats
And out-of-perspective sailors,
In common clay clothes disguised as scales
As a he-god's paddling water skirts,
I astounded the sitting tailors,
I set back the clock faced tailors,

Then, bushily swanked in bear wig and tails,
Hopping hot leaved and feathered
From the kangaroo foot of the earth
From the chill, silent centre,
Trailing the frost bitten cloth,
Up through the lubber curst of Wales
I rocketed to astonish
The flashing needle rock of squatters,
The criers of Shabby and shorten,
The famous stitch droppers.

II

My silly suit, hardly yet suffered for,
Around some coffin carrying
Birdman or told ghost I hung.
And the owl hood, the heel hider,
Claw fold and hole for the rotten
Head, deceived, I believed, my maker,

The cloud perched tailors' master with nerves for cotton.
On the old seas from stories, thrashing my wings,
Combing with antlers, Columbus on fire,
I was pierced by the idol tailor's eyes,
Glared through shark mask and navigating head,
Cold Nansen's beak on boat full of gongs,

To the boy of common thread,
The bright pretender, the ridiculous sea dandy
With dry flesh and earth for adorning and bed.
It was sweet to drown in the readymade handy water

With my cherry capped dangler green as seaweed
Summoning a child's voice from a webfoot stone,
Never never oh never to regret the bugle I wore
On my cleaving arm as I blasted in a wave.

Now shown and mostly bared I would lie down,
Lie down, lie down and live
As quiet as a bone.

-- dylan thomas

Encroachment

Pelorat said, “It seems to me,
Golan,
that the advance of civilization
is nothing
but an exercise in
the limiting of privacy.”

-- Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge
(arranged quote)

The Mountain

Any road followed
precisely to its end
leads precisely nowhere.

Climb the mountain
just a little bit to test that
it's a mountain.

From the top of the mountain,
you cannot see the mountain.

― Frank Herbert, Dune

I know I am but summer to your heart

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.
Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Truth

To know when
a truth will do is
admirable,

since no nontruth
can be presented with
the same sincerity.

Palver once said, “The closer to the truth,
the better the lie,
and the truth itself,
when it can be used,
is the best lie.”

-- Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge

(arranged quote)