Echo Near the End
By Bill Knott
Severs and brothers, brokens and sisters, is this it?
Around me life has darkened like the afternoon.
Anymore to emulate the sunlight's posture,
I slither down off that perfect backbone.
I am alone, but so are we. We are alone but so.
Banking slowly the monster completes its turn --
A clingathon of wings flaps through a halo
That holds a weddingring up to a keyhole to
Pen in the one my fear was assisting at
The birth of adrenaline: I pause I postulate.
Wait. A mousehole Morpheus stamps our passport;
Let's hope sleep has the good stuff tonight.
Murder blinks eyes upon eyes. Suicides
Stick to the roof of the mouth, stupid tripod of spit.
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From Poet's Choice by Robert Pinsky in The Washington Post Book World. Pinsky calls Knott "eccentric, uneven, brilliant, authentic," and says he writes "as if tired of the flat, all-purpose formal sameness of the lines and structures in so many new books of poetry -- including would-be experimental ones. His new book is The Unsubscriber, published by Farrar Straus Giroux.
Had an insanely busy day...had to get up early for a Saturday to get ready for my younger son's Hebrew school's model seder (this year we only had to bring seder plates, not hard-boil eggs for 40, at least). This was fun, as my mother is a Hebrew school teacher and it's been a family event since my older one started attending the nursery school there nearly 10 years ago. Then we came home, rushed to change and went to the younger son's soccer game (they won again) while older son played at a friend's house. Picked him up on the way back (
So I'm back to thinking that it may be easiest simply to delete this journal and start over with one that's locked from the start, though I'm not sure what will happen to any entries of mine that have already been archived from here even if I delete. And the thing is, I'd really like to keep this username, which I have used in multiple fandoms for more than ten years. Does anyone know whether LiveJournal makes names available again after an account has been deleted and purged? Or whether there is a way to dump all content from the journal without my having to delete each entry individually -- to return it to default parameters, as it were? I generally save my entries each day, so I have most of them archived on my hard drive; I will probably lose a great many conversations that occurred in comments but I really can't see how I could manage to lock entry by entry. I suppose conversely I could go back and lock only the entries that contain fan fiction or adult discussions and any mention of family or personal stuff, but even that would be a massive, weeks-long project. I don't even have words for how much I hate LiveJournal right now; I am so, so tempted to switch to blogging at a site that promises no RSS feeds, but I would miss the community here so much.
The ten plagues spilled on the Passover tablecloth. The custom is that a drop of wine is spilled for each of the plagues to reflect our sorrow that the Egyptians had to suffer for the Jews to be free, but all this does is remind me how throughly I do not believe in anything attributed to God in the Bible. God is pissed at Pharaoh so he slays the firstborn of every Egyptian household? The same God who killed every single person and animal on Earth except Noah, his family and his floating zoo? Way to make me a pagan, Mom!
At my son's soccer game. His team wears one shade of blue and the opponents wore another shade of blue, so in the sunlight it was sometimes difficult to tell who had the ball. I was half-watching, half-talking to other parents and sort of trying to sneak peeks at my book, so I missed the finer details of the game, but I do know that we won and that there were Doritos for snack, as my son got the powdered cheese all over his soccer uniform.
The neighbors' yard, with a variety of bright blooming flowers. I love the red, white and blue thing they have going in the hanging basket, and also those very, very red tulips. Naked cupid statuary does not tend to be my thing.
Pink petals, blue sky. These trees are already past their peak, as you can tell from the brown edges of many of the petals; what you can't see in this picture are the hundreds of petals beneath the tree making the sidewalk slippery, though very pretty and shiny.
And here are yellow tulips. The range of colors is just amazing -- we have a very pink tree hanging over our front steps from our neighbor's yard, a bunch of periwinkle in bloom in front of our house, azaleas just starting to peek out, dogwoods coming into full bloom...my nose was even cooperative, though I still seem to be tired, scratchy-throated and a little achy.
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