#throwbackthursday

Current mood.  Ah, heck, it's always current. (2015)

Are You Lonesome Tonight?

My kitchen sure is a sight.

Reminds Me of Summer Camp Back in '81

Jenny Kiss’d Me:

Jenny kissed me when we met,

   Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

   Sweets into your list, put that in:

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,

   Say that health and wealth have missed me,

Say I'm growing old, but add,

   Jenny kissed me.

Leigh Hunt.

Fresh

Probably my favorite reference to my favorite movie in this scene.

What...Is Your Favorite Color?

Who Guessed Amiss the Riddle of the Sphinx:

In the night my great swamp-willow fell.
I had run home early, dark by five,
To find the young sphinx and the hearth swept bare
By the lazy thrashing of her tail. 

A scraping on my window woke me late.
Circling those roots aghast in air
I asked of wind, of rottenness the cause,
As yet unaware of having forgotten 

Her yellow gaze unwinking, vertical pupil,
Stiff wing, dark nipple, firelit paws
—All that the odor of my palm brings back
Hiding my face, beside the boughs 

Whose tall believed exuberance fallen,
Bug goes witless, liquors lack,
Profusion riddled to its core of dream
Dies, whispering names. 

She only from the dead flames rose,
Had licked my fingers but sweet milk disdained.
Henceforth, bareness extreme,
No more this hand has branchings of a tree.

James Merrill.

Feel like I'm looking for my soul

Like a poor man looking for gold.

King of the Mud

Yertle the Turtle:

"Hooray!" shouted Yertle.  "I'm the king of the trees!
I'm king of the birds! And I'm king of the bees!
I'm king of the butterflies! King of the air!
Ah, me! What a throne! What a wonderful chair!
I'm Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me!
For I am the ruler of all that I see!"

Then...from below, in the great heavy stack,
Came a groan from that plain little turtle named Mack.
"Your Majesty, please... I don't like to complain,
But down here below, we are feeling great pain.
I know, up on top you are seeing great sights,
But down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights...

Theodor Seuss Geisel.

Look around

Everywhere you turn is heartache.

Omnes viae

Rome:

You search in Rome for Rome? Oh traveller!
In Rome itself there is no room for Rome,
a corpse is all its churches put on show,
the Aventine is its own mound and tomb.
There, where the Palatifie once towered and reigned,
are medals ruined by the hands of time,
they show how more was lost to chance and time
than Hannibal or Caesar could consume.
The Tiber flows still, but its current guards
a city that has fallen in its grave—
each wave's a woman tearing at her breast.
Oh Rome! From all your beauty, all your grandeur,
whatever once was firm has fled . . . what once
was fugitive maintains its permanence. 

Robert Lowell.

And the wheels are turning and turning

I guess I kinda understand why this Lynchian ditty might've found its way into the Starship Troopers soundtrack, but it still seems a bit odd.

Sparrows Fall Aslant His Gaze

Ode for the American Dead in Asia:

God love you now, if no one else will ever,

Corpse in the paddy, or dead on a high hill

In the fine and ruinous summer of a war

You never wanted. All your false flags were

Of bravery and ignorance, like grade school maps:

Colors of countries you would never see—

Until that weekend in eternity

When, laughing, well armed, perfectly ready to kill

The world and your brother, the safe commanders sent

You into your future. Oh, dead on a hill,

Dead in a paddy, leeched and tumbled to

A tomb of footnotes. We mourn a changeling: you:

Handselled to poverty and drummed to war

By distinguished masters whom you never knew.

Thomas McGrath.

Hey, Kitten, what's going on?

As Operation Esptein Fury is unleashed, all I can say from my privileged space is that I'm super lucky to be so busy at work - juggling 3 different audiences and courses, multiple times a day, with an added bonus of our team's all-hands onsite this coming week - that I can (and must) compartmentalize.

Well, mostly.  The siren song of social media keeps drawing me into the doomscrolling shoals, even as I try to distract myself with broken lab environments and Unrivaled playoffs.  I'm really getting too old for this shit.

On occasion, the kids have asked me what my favorite decade was.  Hands down, the 90s.  I was young, and full of optimism because the Cold War was over, so it really was a rocking time with as close an approximation to a peaceful world as I've ever known.

In a related vein, Sadie asked just this morning if Sam was pranking her when he said I'd met Bill Clinton.  I did!  Well, I shook his hand, at any rate, when he came to Burlington for a rally in September of '92.  

Pat Leahy introduced him, and proceeded to shout himself hoarse over the course of the event.  The following Monday at the office, I announced that I had shaken the hand of our next preznit.  One of the rare times I've been right about anything political.

And that makes me 1 (one) handshake away from Trump, Putin, and the Dalai Lama, so I got that going for me.

Pax.

PS - In case it isn't clear, blogging will be light, mostly poetry/video signoffs.  Got a lot on my mind, no time to rant.

An eighteenth century brain

In a twenty-first century head.

intellectus agens corvorum

Business of Ravens:

What are these ravens doing in our trees,
Calling on doom and outworn prophecies?—
Flying in threes.

Their sinister shadow, their funereal wing
Blots the fresh color out of everything.
They do not sing,

Nor shake their throats like all the other birds;
But, in cracked monotones or broken thirds,
Their crooked words

Cowardly and contemptuous are thrown
At scarecrows who, with business of their own,
Let them alone.

Louis Untermeyer.