Poem for Sunday

Psalm
By George Oppen

Veritas sequitur . . .

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down --
That they are there!

                Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass

                The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

                Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

                The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

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From this morning's Poet's Choice column in The Washington Post, Edward Hirsch on George Oppen:

There is enormous human loneliness at the heart of Oppen's scrupulously crafted poems, which are devoted to precision, accuracy and clarity. 'I have not and never had any motive of poetry/But to achieve clarity,' he declared in 'Route.' He also said, 'true seeing is an act of love.' The massive solitude in Oppen's work, wholly devoid of Romantic despair, seems an intrinsic part of his recognition that the Earth itself can never be known.

Also, the Post had this article by Philip Kennicott on Harry Potter and the nature of evil. It cites this: "Michael Bronski, in the Boston Phoenix, connected the basic themes and language of Harry Potter to gay identity politics. He didn't argue that the fictional figure of Harry Potter is gay (though that's how the press played his remarkably nuanced argument), but that to present Harry as different, to express the complex dynamic of secrecy that separates the world of magic and the everyday world, Rowling couldn't avoid explicitly homosexual-laden words and themes. He argues that fundamentalists, who find the series subversive, are on to something: 'The Harry Potter books are a threat...not because they romanticize witchcraft and wizardry, but because they are deeply subversive in their unremitting attacks on the received wisdom that being 'normal' is good, reasonable, or even healthy.'" I'd somehow never read that article before, though I've seen articles arguing against it. It's here for anyone who's interested and somehow ended up under the same rock as myself.

Aragorn and Boromir apparently took it upon themselves to try to dig their way out of their cage last night. Cleverly, they seem to have figured out where the front door is, because the enormous mess consisting of several inches of shavings dumped all over the kitchen floor seems to have been kicked through the bars right under the door. Sigh. I can see that keeping the Ranger in thrall will not be an easy task.

Must go round up "Similitude" reviews. More later.