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Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
Gerard Van der Leun
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New Wood Pile!
http://www.woodpilereport.com/
Thanks for the Woodpile link, Ghost. He links to an article there that may well be the most sane piece of writing about the Covid situation that I’ve yet see:
Inside The Hospitals & Why The Lockdown?
Talking about hospitals, I’ve been in two different ones this past week plus a doctor’s office in between (daughter choose an interesting time to break her arm). Ghost towns, everybody masked, nary a cough or sniffle to be heard anywhere. Weirdly, it’s not such a bad time to be hurt since there’s not much waiting going on, and the staff in all places have been great. The one we were at today supposedly had
a few covid patients somewhere, but nowhere near where we were. One more anecdote, from an area in SoCal that’s supposedly had a lot of cases.
Armstrong Economics has penned a letter to the President. This is very good. Three pages in length. Mailed April 13th to Trump, Powell, Mnuchin, McConnell, Scalise and a few others. These are surreal and dangerous times. To express even slight skepticism of the the full trajectory of this shut down, I receive scorn and revulsion from family, friends and neighbors. Sorry, there just ain’t enough dead lately to justify the dismantling of civilization. Whoops… I said it again.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/opinion/letter-to-president-trump-send-it-everywhere-you-can/
Chance of a shower? 100% for me (in the bathroom)!