slow reads

A kangaroo court

Dear Sen. Warner, I know the public documents, videotape, and proffered evidence at the former president’s trial yesterday was damning, but it hardly registered with half of our country. What would still register — miraculously, perhaps, at this late stage of our national unraveling — is courtroom testimony. Take the Constitution seriously concerning the court… Continue reading A kangaroo court

What I read this year

Here’s what I read this year, alphabetized by last name: Genesis, translated by Robert Alter Exodus, translated by Robert Alter Leviticus, translated by Robert Alter Jonah, translated by Robert Alter On Revolution by Hanna Arendt (third read) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson (second read) The Poetics of… Continue reading What I read this year

Transcendent matters

From today’s New York Times: A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that Congress could not sue to enforce its subpoenas of executive branch officials, handing a major victory to President Trump and dealing a severe blow to the power of Congress to conduct oversight. In a ruling that could have far-reaching consequences for executive… Continue reading Transcendent matters

Have you never read?

They were indignant and asked him, ‘Do you hear what they are saying?’ Jesus answered, ‘I do. Have you never read the text, “You have made children and babes at the breast sound your praise aloud”?’ – Matthew 21:15 – 16, REB What haven’t I read this year? This year I never read Rhinoceros. I’ve thought about… Continue reading Have you never read?

In my stocking

And heaven and nature

When people ask me for prayer, sometimes it bugs me. This morning, after years of my feeling this way, Meister Eckhart offers me an explanation: People often say to me: “Pray for me!” Then I think: “Why do you go out of yourselves? Why don’t you stay within yourselves and grasp your own blessings? After… Continue reading And heaven and nature

On the wing

After drinking her smoothie, Bethany said, “I must make haste.” “Do you have a recipe for haste,” I asked, “or do you just wing it?” She paused. “I usually just wing it.” And she left.

Sadism and civic impotence

A friend’s homely benediction last week: “Well, now that we’ve solved all the world’s problems . . .” It was perfect: all we had said had the force of cliches. We “solve the world’s problems” because we sense we were made to tend our land together. But we have no civic plot to tend. So… Continue reading Sadism and civic impotence

Restoring the middle class

America taught Hitler that need blurred into desire, and that desire arose from comparison. . . . Families observed other families: around the corner, but also, thanks to modern media, around the world. . . . “Through modern technology and the communication it enables,” wrote Hitler, “international relations between peoples have become so effortless and… Continue reading Restoring the middle class

The church rescues Il Duce

In June of 1924, Mussolini was in trouble. Fascist thugs with ties to him had murdered Italy’s top Socialist parliamentarian, Giacomo Matteotti. The public assumed that Mussolini had ordered it, and Italy was in an uproar. Even conservatives were beginning to distinguish between nationalism, which they embraced, and the overthrow of democracy, which they weren’t… Continue reading The church rescues Il Duce

Categories

Passages

Woodcock Spring

1 March 2021 - Marcia Bonta

Shortly before dark last February 10, our son Dave walked up the driveway and heard the “peenting” of an American woodcock. He raced up to our house to alert our son Mark and me, and we joined Dave on our veranda to listen. A woodcock (Photo by Don on Flickr, Creative Commons license) A couple minutes passed before both sons said, “Listen.” That’s when I heard the whirr of the woodcock’s wings as he flew overhead. I also saw his distinctive, chunky silhouette. In the nearly 50 years we have lived on our west-central Pennsylvania mountaintop, we had never seen or heard a displaying American woodcock before March 15. But last February was warmer than usual. After heavy rain the previous night, most of the snow had melted, and by evening it was 45 degrees. At least one male woodcock had migrated north early from his wintering grounds in the coastal lowlands from the Carolina’s south and west as far as Texas. Or, more likely, because the winter had been unusually mild, he may have… [Read more...]

OH, YES

1 March 2021 - Tom

Oh, yes --joy bringsanother morning.Let us liftour eyes,let us seewhat sings here.The Middlewesterner [Read more...]

Haplos*

1 March 2021 - Luisa A. Igloria

The river and its hem. Magnolia trees holding in their creamy cocoons. An egret dipping one leg into the current. All around us only the things originally belonging to this world are allowed to touch. * Caress; Tagalog/Filipino [Read more...]

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 8

1 March 2021 - Dave Bonta

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week: signs of spring, political and philosophical reflections, loves and deaths. There’s an air of springexamining the frozenearth by touch, shyly.We’re not ready yetfor happiness, the heavycurtains are still closed.At least the winterwould not lie to us, would notsay all will be good.One doesn’t know now.Magda Kapa, February 2021 A teetering peregrine at the pinnacle of an iced tree. But chickadees. Orioles? Nuthatches. Voices changing. “I can smell the leaves under the water, under the ice,” I say. “Not spring, but evidence of it. Can you?” Amazed, he cannot. The infinite distance. Animal. He says please don’t give up on me. The time of ice shatter and mud seems never to end, is always beginning and beginning: it’s nearly March again. “The sap is up in your willow, did you see?” I mention. He hadn’t, but now that I point it out, he can.The horse is mad… [Read more...]

TEN OLD MONK POEMS (4)

28 February 2021 - Tom

THE OLD MONKREBUKED THEM:You make up wordsas if you canmake up meaning.~I WOULDN'TI wouldn't say these thingsif I didn't have to,the old monk said.Help. Get me out.~DON'T ARGUEDon't argue with it,the old monk said,if it won't argue back.You'll just sound silly.~WHEN SHE TURNSWhen she turns aroundand makes that face,the old monk says,just do it.~SO YOU LIKESo you like thePOUND POUND POUNDof the line?You must play bass,the old monk said.~THE OLD MONK / LOOKEDThe old monklooked at his handsand saw his father.He looked in the mirrorand saw him there too.~IS ITIs itthe stars talking,the old monk wondered,or the cicadas.Do we evenhave cicadas?~THE OLD MONK SAIDThis is alwaysthe most peacefulmoment, now,just before I goto sleep, or die.~THE OLD MONK'SFIRST NOVELThere are more charactersthan I have timeto introduce, he said.So just imagine them.~THE TASTEThe taste of it,the last of the old wine,the old monk said.There's alwaysnext summer.~The Middlewesterner [Read more...]

Feed a fever

28 February 2021 - Dave Bonta

(Lord’s day). Wife took physick this day, I all day at home, and all the morning setting my books in order in my presses, for the following year, their number being much increased since the last, so as I am fain to lay by several books to make room for better, being resolved to keep no more than just my presses will contain. At noon to dinner, my wife coming down to me, and a very good dinner we had, of a powdered leg of pork and a loin of lamb roasted, and with much content she and I and Deb. After dinner, my head combed an hour, and then to work again, and at it, doing many things towards the setting my accounts and papers in order, and so in the evening Mr. Pelling supping with us, and to supper, and so to bed. sick all day at home my books depress so I make room for more leg of pork and a roasted head setting my paper supper Erasure poems derived from The… [Read more...]

Ambush

28 February 2021 - Dale

Von Tal says:Left out of the conversation? The fact that, for nearly all of our evolutionary and historical time, we have been surrounded or neighbored by predators, animal or human.The possibility -- probability -- of sudden death or capture, by sentient beings that desire our death, or our absorption, is not our abnormal state. It was our normal state. And we patrolled our boundaries, or helped each other to escape, and that is what made the social bonds we most trust. We saved each other's lives.And although that is not the world we live in now, you can tell it's our normal world, because all our stories immediately return to it. Countless narratives of banding together to defeat predators. Despite the fact that most of us will never meet a creature that means to kill us in our lives. In the absence of predatory enemies, we experience, paradoxically, much higher levels of anxiety, because we do not know -- push come to shove -- that anyone will come to our defense. In the absence of predators,… [Read more...]

IN SOME LANGUAGE (13)

28 February 2021 - Tom

In some languagethe word for praisealso means snake.The Middlewesterner [Read more...]

Every Line Intersects the Line at Infinity at Some Point

28 February 2021 - Luisa A. Igloria

"Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe." - János Bolyai (1802-1860) The optometrist asks you to look into the autorefractor: two dark lines form a road that stretches from where you sit to a red barn at the horizon. If your brain tells you that you're looking at a point at infinity rather than just mere inches away, it helps the eyes focus. Things have to end somewhere, don't they? In projective geometry, you're told two parallel lines will intersect, will meet at a point in the line at infinity. If you tilted the horizon up or down, it would remain what it is. If you turned around, infinity would still be there as an infinitely beckoning horizon. But what a strange idea: how in that world, another traveling along the same line as you at parallel distance will arrive with you at the edge of the world. Maybe you can't see them now or touch them. Maybe they haven't spoken to you in months, in years. Maybe you move along, uncertainly:… [Read more...]

The true people

28 February 2021 - Dave Bonta

Up, and to the office pretty betimes, and the Board not meeting as soon as I wished, I was forced to go to White Hall in expectation of a Committee for Tangier, but when I come it was put off, and so home again to the office, and sat till past two o’clock; where at the Board some high words passed between Sir W. Pen and I, begun by me, and yielded to by him, I being in the right in finding fault with him for his neglect of duty. At noon home to dinner, and after dinner out with my wife, thinking to have gone to the Duke of York’s playhouse, but was, to my great content in the saving my vow, hindered by coming a little too late; and so, it being a fine day, we out to Islington, and there to the old house and eat cheese-cakes and drank and talked, and so home in the evening, the ways being mighty bad, so as we had no pleasure in being abroad at… [Read more...]

WE NEED

27 February 2021 - Tom

We need eaglesthe way we needthe wind, to cleanup emptiness.The Middlewesterner [Read more...]

02.26.21

27 February 2021 - James Brush

second dosewinter rages deepinside me [Read more...]

SNOWY MORNING

27 February 2021 - Tom

Snowy morning.No one knowswhere hawk has gone.The Middlewesterner [Read more...]

Prime Cause

27 February 2021 - Luisa A. Igloria

Who knows where anything begins: if seed, if stock, if accident lays the ground for what manifests after decades of quietude— One day, a body thinking only of walking itself home takes a small detour. Takes a leap, as if to clear a fence. Hopes to take the moon but needless to say, inherits only the steadfast earth. What remnant of that hard encounter with the truth lodges as bone, as breach, as shredded endoneurion? The body after all is mass and also its own residue. A tremor scales the walls; vines hold to the trellis. After a while, it's hard to tell if the foliage moves, or is moved. [Read more...]

Library

27 February 2021 - Dave Bonta

Up; and by coach, with W. Griffin with me, and our Contract-books, to Durham Yard, to the Commissioners for Accounts; the first time I ever was there; and staid awhile before I was admitted to them. I did observe a great many people attending about complaints of seamen concerning tickets, and, among others, Mr. Carcasse, and Mr. Martin, my purser. And I observe a fellow, one Collins, is there, who is employed by these Commissioners particularly to hold an office in Bishopsgate Street, or somewhere thereabouts, to receive complaints of all people about tickets: and I believe he will have work enough. Presently I was called in, where I found the whole number of Commissioners, and was there received with great respect and kindness; and did give them great satisfaction, making it my endeavour to inform them what it was they were to expect from me, and what was the duty of other people; this being my only way to preserve myself, after all my pains and trouble. They did ask many questions, and demanded… [Read more...]

NOT LIKE DAWN

26 February 2021 - Tom

Not like dawnor dusk, thesuddennessof it. Allthe autumnleaves fallingtoday, alltheir blessingslost. How totell you morethan that inwind like this?The Middlewesterner [Read more...]

IN SOME LANGUAGE (12)

26 February 2021 - Tom

In some languagethe word for mindmeans emptinessand also means promise.The Middlewesterner [Read more...]

Scallions

26 February 2021 - rbarenblat@gmail.com (Velveteen Rabbi)

The scent of this covid year:sour scallion-water in the kitchen window, the tail-ends of green onions trying to miracle fresh green from tap water and sun.When it catches in my throatI choke, then rememberif my sense of smellstill works, how lucky I am. [Read more...]

Itinerant Stanzas

26 February 2021 - Luisa A. Igloria

Nets stretch through trees but we make fables about milkweed butterflies and birds flying blind. * A birthing chair, oiled to a dark sheen. Even furniture sings odes to the ways in which certain bodies are made to open. * The fantasy in which you find your way back doesn't exist, even if you remember the name of every river or road shaped like the ideogram for home. * Lean back into your own body, then. Cradle and fist, shuttle and loom. A boat at night. Above all, a boat. [Read more...]

Comestibles

26 February 2021 - Dave Bonta

Up, it being fast day for the King’s death, and so I and Mr. Gibson by water to the Temple, and there all the morning with Auditor Wood, and I did deliver in the whole of my accounts and run them over in three hours with full satisfaction, and so with great content thence, he and I, and our clerks, and Mr. Clerke, the solicitor, to a little ordinary in Hercules-pillars Ally — the Crowne, a poor, sorry place, where a fellow, in twelve years, hath gained an estate of, as he says, 600l. a-year, which is very strange, and there dined, and had a good dinner, and very good discourse between them, old men belonging to the law, and here I first heard that my cozen Pepys, of Salisbury Court, was Marshal to my Lord Cooke when he was Lord Chief justice; which beginning of his I did not know to be so low: but so it was, it seems. After dinner I home, calling at my bookbinder’s, but he not within. When come… [Read more...]