Saturday, January 29, 2011

Poem for Saturday and Leopards

Irritable Mystic
By Nathaniel Mackey


— "mu" fifth part —

  His they their
we, their he
 his was but if
need be one,
                    self-
  extinguishing
I, neither sham nor
 excuse yet an
alibi, exited,
                  out,
                         else
the only where
 he'd be.

              Before
the long since
  remaindered
 body, imagines
each crack, each
    crevice as it sweats
   under cloth,
                    numbed
  inarticulate
                   tongues touching
     down on love's endlessly
 warmed-over thigh.
                             The awaited one
    she mistook him for haunts
       him, tells him in
     dreams he told
                            him so.
       Such offense,
   but at what
      won't say,
                     moot
   remonstrance,
                       no resolve if not
      not to be caught
                             out. . .

     Abstract advance, its
    advantage unproved,
       unbelieved-in,
                            vain
     what wish would
 give. . .
             Late eighties
                                night
momentarily bleached by
         bomblight. Awoke,
     maybe inwardly wanted
                                       it,
       wrestling with dreams
                                      of the
 awaited one again.
                            Thought
back but a moment later
        what moodier start
     to have gotten off
                                to,
       angered by that but
 begrudged it its impact
                                and
     so sits remembering,
         pretending, shrugs it
off. . .

             Arced harp. Dark
     bent-over body. Esoteric
         sun whose boat its
                                     back
 upheld. . .
                 Unseizably
vast underbelly of
                           light,
       limb-letting thrust.
                                  Tread of
     hoofs. Weighted udders of
 dust. . .
               His it their she
once they awake,
                                 the
       arisen one,
                        world
           at her feet,
                                 her feet
       one with their
                           rapture,
   ankledeep in damage
                                   though she
           dances. . .
 The slippings off
                         of her
 of their hands define
her hips, whose are
       the suns whose
                              heat
           his nights taste
                                  of
     and as at last he
       lies her legs loom,
                                   naked,
 loose gown pulled from
           her, sleep
                           turns.
And he with his
                         postures
           cramps the air,
                                 bent
       lotuslike, lips
                           part kiss,
                                           part
         pout

--------

It snowed some more, I had a doctor's appointment, it took longer than it should have to get there because although the snow wasn't sticking it was falling very hard right when I needed to be driving, and there were traffic lights out at the major intersection between the mall and the medical complex -- fortunately there were police directing traffic in the lousy visibility. I had to wait quite a while for the doctor, as always, and got conflicting information about follow-up stuff, with the doctor saying one thing and the office saying another. With both my internist and my GYN, I have doctors I love in large practices I really dislike -- scheduling people who don't seem to know what they're talking about, billing staff who can't read their own forms, nurses who have to be called several times to get lab results. Is this just how the medical profession is now? I know lots of other people with the same complaints, and I really don't want to change doctors, but when a doctor tells me to come in at a certain time of the month for a certain procedure then the receptionist tells me sorry but that's absolutely impossible given her schedule, I don't know whether I'm getting the runaround from the doctor I think I like.

The rest of my day, at least, was good, though I had to give up on my plan to get The Wrath of Khan reviewed -- the internet cable was working again when I got back from the doctor, but the router had reset itself and renamed the network, so nobody could log on, and I had a pile of e-mails and forms and things that I had to take care of after more than a day without access to my main computer. I got my Variety with the King's Speech behind the scenes DVD and of course I had to watch that, and I had intended to watch Colin, Geoffrey, and Helena on Piers Morgan (I don't know which excerpt I like more) but he postponed them for coverage of what's going on in Egypt, which is fair enough except that CNN already had most of their other people covering Egypt and they DIDN'T bump the Kardashians last night. I had to turn off the news after a while because it's so stressful to keep seeing some of those images -- we watched A Single Man (yes that is twice in a week but Paul hadn't seen it) and it was cheerful by comparison, Cuban Missile Crisis and all.

Here are some photos of the Maryland Zoo's big cats, acting like kitties:















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