Questianity

I'm going to start a new religion. All the other ones are too sure of themselves for me. (Well, maybe not the Unitarians or the Buddhists, but there's something too starchy about the former and too detached about the latter.) Its symbol (i.e., its cross or crescent or six-pointed star) will be this:

Its god will be the one Rabelais proposed to meet when he spoke his last words: "I go to seek a Great Perhaps."

Its deadly sins will be the same seven:

1. Pride: the assumption that one has found the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
2. Envy: the preoccupation with whether what other people believe makes them better off than you are
3. Wrath: the willingness to start a fight over beliefs 
4. Avarice: using a community of belief, like a church, for one's own personal gain (e.g., most politicians)
5. Sloth: being too lazy to search and question 
6. Gluttony: pigging out on the perks of being a true believer (e.g., most politicians)
7. Lechery: using the powers of a priesthood for sexual gratification 

Welcome to Questianity, fellow Questioners.

Catch of the Day

The Fish 

I caught a tremendous fish 

and held him beside the boat

half out of water, with my hook 

fast in a corner of his mouth. 

He didn't fight. 

He hadn't fought at all. 

He hung a grunting weight, 

battered and venerable 

and homely. Here and there 

his brown skin hung in strips 

like ancient wallpaper, 

and its pattern of darker brown 

was like wallpaper: 

shapes like full-blown roses 

stained and lost through age. 

He was speckled with barnacles, 

fine rosettes oflime, 

and infested 

with tiny white sea-lice, 

and underneath two or three 

rags of green weed hung down. 

While his gills were breathing in 

the terrible oxygen 

-- the frightening gills, 

fresh and crisp with blood, 

that can cut so badly -- 

I thought of the coarse white flesh 

packed in like feathrs, 

the big bones and the little bones, 

the dramatic reds and blacks 

of his shiny entrails, 

and the pink swim-bladder 

like a big peony. 

I looked into his eyes 

which were far larger than mine 

but shallower, and yellowed, 

the irises backed and packed 

with tarnished tinfoil 

seen through the lenses 

of old scratched isinglass. 

They shifted a little, but not 

to return my stare 

-- It was more like the tipping 

of an object toward the light. 

I admired his sullen face, 

the mechanism of his jaw, 

and then I saw 

that from his lower lip 

-- if you could call it a lip -- 

grim, we, and weaponlike, 

hung five old pieces of fish-line, 

or four and a wire leader 

with the swivel still attached, 

with all their five big hooks 

grown firmly in his mouth. 

A green line, frayed at the end 

where he broke it, two heavier lines, 

and a fine black thread 

still crimped from the strain and snap 

when it broke and he got away. 

Like medals with their ribbons 

frayed and wavering, 

a five-haired beard of wisdom 

trailing from his aching jaw. 

I stared and stared 

and victory filled up 

the little rented boat, 

from the pool of bilge 

where oil had spread a rainbow 

around the rusted engine 

to the bailer rusted orange, 

the sun-cracked thwarts, 

the oarlocks on their strings, 

the gunnels -- until everything 

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! 

And I let the fish go.

--Elizabeth Bishop

Why the GOP Keeps Winning the Blame Game

Blogger Dennis G. at Balloon Juice nails it: 

Look, I know that we face many difficult challenges. A lot of things have gone wrong and more will go wrong. This is to be expected because Republicans have been in charge for most of the last four decades.
Do you really think that you could have Anti-Government Republicans in charge for 30 plus years and actively working to destroy the infrastructure of government without causing system failures? If you do, then you are living in candy land (or a tea infused lotus dream).
The oil spill in the gulf is is just another result of snorting deregulation fairy dust with a Markets-Are-God hi-ball chaser night after night for decades. When you let industry capture regulators and dismantle effective governance, you guarantee a catastrophic failure. The spill is evidence of this, so was that mining disaster in West Virginia, same thing when it comes to that financial meltdown and the same thing will be true when the next system fails.
And when it does, like idiots, we will not blame the failed philosophy of the modern Conservative movement. Nope, we will blame President Obama, liberals and Democrats—because that is what we are used to doing. More than that, we will ignore facts and worry whether or not the optics of the response are right. We will all ask: is we yelling loud enough yet?

From Here to Felinity

Peter

     Strong and slippery, 
built for the midnight grass-party 
confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away -- 
the detached first claw on the foreleg corresponding 
to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds 
or katydid-legs above each eye numbering all units 
in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth 
to droop or rise in unison like porcupine-quills. 
He lets himself be flattened out by gravity, 
as seaweed is tamed and weakened by the sun, 
compelled when extended, to lie stationary. 
Sleep is the result of his delusion that one must 
do as well as one can for oneself, 
sleep -- epitome of what is to him the end of life. 
Demonstrate on him how the lady placed a forked stick 
on the innocuous neck-sides of the dangerous southern snake. 
One need not try to stir him up; his prune-shaped head 
and alligator-eyes are not party to the joke. 
Lifted and handled, he may be dangled like an eel 
or set up on the forearm like a mouse; 
his eyes bisected by pupils of a pin's width, 
are flickeringly exhibited, then covered up. 
May be? I should have said might have been; 
when he has been got the better of in a dream -- 
as in a fight with nature or with cats, we all know it. 
Profound sleep is not with him a fixed illusion. 
Springing about with froglike accuracy, with jerky cries 
when taken in hand, he is himself again; 
to sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair 
would be unprofitable -- human. What is the good of hypocrisy? 
It is permissible to choose one's employment, 
to abandon the nail, or roly-poly, 
when it shows signs of being no longer a pleasure, 
to score the nearby magazine with a double line of strokes. 
He can talk but insolently says nothing. What of it? 
When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment. 
It is clear that he can see the virtue of naturalness, 
that he does not regard the published fact as a surrender. 
As for the disposition invariably to affront, 
an animal with claws should have an opportunity to use them. 
The eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident. 
To leap, to lengthen out, divide the air, to purloin, to pursue. 
To tell the hen: fly over the fence, go in the wrong way 
in your perturbation -- this is life; 
to do less would be nothing but dishonesty.

--Marianne Moore 

Ukiah Is Haiku Spelled Backward

Four Haiku

     A balmy spring wind 
Reminding me of something 
     I cannot recall. 


     The green cockleburrs 
Caught in the thick wooly hair 
     Of the black boy's head. 


     Standing in the field, 
I hear the whispering of 
     Snowflake to snowflake. 


     It is September 
The month in which I was born, 
     And I have no thoughts. 

--Richard Wright

_____

     Most haiku are just 
Trifling Japonaiserie. 
     Wright's, however, aren't.

Poem of the Day: Ezra Pound

A Study in Aesthetics 

The very small children in patched clothing,
Being smitten with an unusual wisdom,
Stopped in their play as she passed them
And cried up from their cobbles:
                 
                    Guarda! Ahi, guarda! ch' è be' a!

But three years after this
I heard the young Dante, whose last name I do not know --
For there are in Sirmione, twenty-eight young Dantes
     and thirty-four Catulli;
And there had been a great catch of sardines,
And his elders
Were packing them in the great wooden boxes
For the market in Brescia, and he
Leapt about, snatching at the bright fish
And getting in both of their ways;
And in vain they commanded him to sta fermo!
And when they would not let him arrange
The fish in the boxes
He stroked those which were already arranged,
Murmuring for his own satisfaction
This identical phrase:

                                          Ch' è  be' a.

And at this I was mildly abashed.

--Ezra Pound

I think if Pound had written more poems like this one and fewer Cantos, I'd like him a lot more. The Italian says, "Look! Oh, look! How beautiful she is!" and sta fermo means "stand still."          

Poem of the Day: Louis MacNeice

Snow 

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was 

Spawning snow and pink roses against it 

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: 

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, 

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion 

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel 

The drunkenness of things being various. 

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world 

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes --- 

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -- 

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses. 

--Louis MacNeice

Poem of the Day: D.H. Lawrence

Bavarian Gentians 

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and dark stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.

--D.H. Lawrence

Poem of the Day: Theodore Roethke

I Knew a Woman 

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, 

When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; 

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: 

The shapes a bright container can contain! 

Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, 

Or English poets who grew up on Greek 

(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek). 

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, 

She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand; 

She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin; 

I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand; 

She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake, 

Coming behind her for her pretty sake 

(But what prodigious mowing we did make). 

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose: 

Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize; 

She played it quick, she played it light and loose; 

My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees; 

Her several parts could keep a pure repose, 

Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose 

(She moved in circles, and those circles moved). 

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: 

I'm martyr to a motion not my own; 

What's freedom for? To know eternity. 

I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. 

But who would count eternity in days? 

These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: 

(I measure time by how a body sways).

--Theodore Roethke 

I don't think any twentieth-century poet caught the spirit of Donne or Marvell or Herrick better than Roethke did in this wonderful, sexy poem. 

Poem of the Day: William Carlos Williams

Poem 

As the cat
climbed over
the top of 

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

--William Carlos Williams