#throwbackthursday

Do you wanna build a snowman?  And bring it in the house?  (2021)

Wild eyes in the wilderness

Where're you going with the devil in hand?

Autothrenody

Sylvia Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath:

If you can’t feel love in life you won’t feel it in death, nor

Will you feel the tulip’s skin, nor the soft gravel

Of childhood under cheek. You will have writhed

Across the page for a hard couplet, a firm rhyme, ass

High as any downward dog, and cutlass arms

Lashing any mother who tries to pass: Let’s be frank

About the cost of spurs, mothers like peonies

Whirling in storm drains, families sunk before

Reaching open water. The empty boudoir

Will haunt, but not how you imagine it will.

Nothing, not even death frees mothers

From the cutting board, the balloons, their

Lack of resistance, thoughts, he said, quick

As tulips staggering across the quad.

She heard, I like my women splayed

Out, red. Read swollen, domesticated,

Wanting out. The tulips were never warm

My loves, they never smelled of spring,

They never marked the path out of loneliness,

Never led me home, nor to me, nor away

From what spring, or red, or tulips

Could never be.

Sina Queyras.

ديني

So I think 'deny' is actually an alternate transliteration of 'dini', which appears to mean religious or, perhaps more aptly in this context, faithful?

Здесь прошелся загадки таинственный ноготь

Here the Trace:

Here the trace of enigma's strange fingernail shows.
"It is late. Let me sleep, and at dawn I’ll reread
And then all will be clear. Till they wake me, there’s none
Who can move the beloved as I move her, indeed!”

How I moved you! You bent to the brass of my lips
As an audience stirred by a tragedy thrills.
Ah, that kiss was like summer. It lingered, delayed.
Swelling slow to a storm as it topples and spills.

As the birds drink, I drank. Till I swooned still I sucked.
As they flow through the gullet, the stars seem to stop.
But the nightingales shuddering roll their bright eyes.
As they drain the vast vault of the night, drop by drop.

Boris Pasternak.

All our times have come

Quick history hit from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum:

On January 6th, 1965, Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana and Representative Emanuel Celler of New York introduced joint resolutions in the Senate and House of Representatives aimed at clarifying and defining the rules on Presidential succession and inability in the Constitution. The Bayh-Celler proposals, which formed the foundation of the 25th Amendment, refined the processes of declaring a President incapable of fulfilling the duties of office and filling a Vice Presidential vacancy.

Congress approved the 25th Amendment on July 6, 1965. The states completed ratification by February 10, 1967, and President Lyndon Johnson certified the amendment on February 23, 1967.

The first use of the 25th Amendment occurred in 1973 when President Richard Nixon nominated Congressman Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to fill the vacancy left by Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation.

In less than a year, the 25th Amendment would be used again, this time when Vice President Ford became President after Richard Nixon resigned. Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller to fill the Vice Presidential vacancy.

My favorite part:

Section 1

In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

Let's just say I'm on Team Blood Clot.

<exits singing, Here, but now they're gone>

Fly it all out like an eagle in a sunbeam

Ride it on out like you were a bird.

The Increase of Disorder or Entropy Is What Distinguishes the Past from the Future

I Have a Time Machine:

But unfortunately it can only travel into the future

at a rate of one second per second,

 

which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant

committees and even to me.

 

But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next

moment and to the next.

 

Thing is, I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead—

well not zipping—And if I try

 

to get out of this time machine, open the latch,

I'll fall into space, unconscious,

 

then desiccated! And I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that.

So I stay inside.

 

There's a window, though. It shows the past.

It's like a television or fish tank.

 

But it's never live; it's always over. The fish swim

in backward circles.

 

Sometimes it's like a rearview mirror, another chance

to see what I'm leaving behind,

 

and sometimes like blackout, all that time

wasted sleeping.

 

Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment

at having lost a library book.

 

Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting

to be found charming.

 

Me holding a rose though I want to put it down

so I can smoke.

 

Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me

because the explosion

 

of some dark star all the way back struck hard

at mother's mother's mother.

 

I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow.

I thought I'd find myself

 

an old woman by now, traveling so light in time.

But I haven't gotten far at all.

 

Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I'd like;

the past is so horribly fast.

Brenda Shaughnessy.