thee istsfor manity reader

Providential (redux)

This town provides:

Mothers smile and say hello, 
Fathers hit fungo to their sons,
Families rally around the flag,
White picket fences keep others out,

Ambulances cruise & never use sirens,
Dogs never bark or froth,
Pigeons align themselves from pole to pole—

On electrified wires.

What I’m Reading:

All that grave weight of America
Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!

— Louis Simpson / “Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain”

CHEER UP …

… the earth is burning to a crisp as it simultaneously floods with water undrinkable …

… election season is upon us …

… the planet’s little wars are joining hands …

… i got mine, now you get yours—i don’t care …

… gonna take all them hard earned rights away—we don’t care …

… oil companies and other mega-corporations get tax breaks, government subsidies, supercharged tax shelters, while u pay ur taxes—we don’t care …

… did i mention me and my family got ours, and u and urs may get squat, or never will get any—do we care? …

… CHEER UP!

What I’m Reading:

Besides, there are
tears which happen in a day
that it would take
a lifetime to explain.

— Mary Ruefle / “Trollope”

Self-Inflicted Dodo Dada (redux)

A dusty path toward deliverance after a club on the head, a dark hour, a black age—

Quashed then regained. Diverted, re-charted, and reoriented

The crags and canyons—vertiginous—skirted. The roiling water. Up ahead the fog-smoke.

We live beneath the heat dome once a year—but the duration metastasizes—

At the terminal hour we’ll live beneath the heat dome year-round as feedback loops unspool their violence

In ineluctable gyres—followed by the exhalation of a bated agonal breath.

What I’m Reading:

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken-hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

— James Wright / “Lying in a Hammock at a Friend’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Returning to the very same place,
let it be a hilltop
with a view of the night city …

— Tadeusz Dąbrowski / “Hilltop”

It is dangerous — extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer, so you need to take it seriously…

— Michelle Grossman / NBC News Meteorologist

Global warming is costing lives, deepening health inequality and driving the spread of diseases across Europe. A review of hundreds of studies has revealed that between 2013 and 2022, there were around 17 more heat-related deaths per 100,000 people per year than during the previous nine years.

— Carissa Wong / “How climate change is hitting Europe” / Nature

… I want to catch your thin neck full
bodied breath in the blue

funeral vase, your death
masked. this is like that

satanist music where they
play it backwards. so I’ve heard.

— Stella Wong / “dramatic monologue as Beatriz Ferreyra”

My experience with high temperatures in the PNW heat dome included misery, anger, and desperation. The longer the heat went on the more obsessively focused on it I became. After three days all I could think about was how to cool down …

— Anonymous / from Bill McKibben’s Substack newsletter

To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense. The world keeps opening up, unfolding, and just when we expect it to be closed — to be a sealed, sensible box — it shows us something completely surprising.

— David Byrne / Arboretum

… where once you used to be,
when your “whole life”
still lay ahead of you,
when everything was before.

— Tadeusz Dąbrowski / “Hilltop”

What I’m Listening To:

And the time will come when you see
we are all one, and life flows within
within you and without you

— George Harrison, Beatles / “Within You Without You”

What I’m Reading:

forget the calls,
errands at the mall —
yr resolve’s
superfluous
as a clitoris.

— Maureen N. McLane / “Best Laid”

What I’m Reading:

life has me holding a grudge 
pouring coffee on my recollections 
not revealing where the moon finds its water

—Évelyne Trouillot / “A Rain of Stars”