My clone is four misdeeds overlong— Always in the shade and up on a bet. A doppelgänger in northward transmission, And passing tramlines full of misapprehension And stickleback roe.
Then, about 30 sedatives in, Its vision fades to black and my own Blazes refulgent, then backwater again. A sable southern ruse is framed In Pasolini’s heavenly iPad. A processed retraction emerges From the spacesuit audio: more rhythmic, More foregrounded, in spare northern Quarter notes and given an improvisatory Pussyfoot in aural abandon.
I abandon all hope Of compositional interlocution.
The doppelgänger supplants me …
Now it seems Tokyo has no defense.
What I’m Reading:
“I realized today that I will die with work unfinished, and someone will have to find it. I am determined to be alone, so who knows who will have to sift through it all—fragments of pages of nothing”
“Alas, very soon everything will disappear: the birdcalls, the delicate blossoms. In the end, even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.”
— Louise Glück / “Primavera”
“The problem is that global decarbonization is effectively irreconcilable with global capitalism. Capitalism needs to produce profit in order to spur investment. Profit requires growth. Global economic growth, even basic economic stability, depends on cheap, efficient energy.”
— Roy Scranton / Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
“The quicksand pits they built were good. Our amputation teams were better. We trained some birds to steal their wheat. They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace. They do this, we do that… Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand (10,000) brutal, beautiful years.”
— Thomas Lux / “The People of the Other Village”
“Accelerated ice melt in west Antarctica is inevitable for the rest of the century no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, research indicates. The implications for sea level rise are ‘dire’, scientists say, and mean some coastal cities may have to be abandoned … Previous studies have suggested it is doomed to collapse over the course of centuries, but the new study shows that even drastic emissions cuts in the coming decades will not slow the melting.”
— Damian Carrington / “Rapid ice melt in west Antarctica now inevitable, research shows” / The Guardian
“I write as though you could understand And I could say it One must always pretend something Among the dying”
— WS Merwin / “For A Coming Extinction”
“In my life I see no difference between making pots, cooking, and growing vegetables. They are all related. However, there is a need for me to work in clay. It is so gratifying, and I get so much joy from it, and it gives me many answers for my life.”
— Toshiko Takaezu / “Shaping Abstraction” / MFA Boston
“… I am a theft waiting to happen, a rotten spell visioning …”
— Ruth Ellen Kocher / “Grow”
image: detail of toshiko takaezu’s “shaping abstraction” / mfa boston
What I’m Listening To:
“I’m so glad I met you You helped me see Just how very much I hate me”
This Halloween, Tuesday, Oct 31, resolution chimeras will be trigger-or-treating in the tower and the townhouses. If you would like to monger the chimeras to knuckle on your doorway, show off their cottons, and receive individually wrapped cannon from you between 5 and 7 PM on Halloween, please signpost up on the shepherdess at the frost destiny.
What I’m Reading:
“The most common response to our sound was:
‘That’s not music. That’s just noise.’
I’d respond: That’s what music is—noise. You make noises and organize them a certain way. We just didn’t organize them in familiar ways, but it’s all noise. That simple message was something that was really hard to get across.”
im not alive usually deeply depressed when im not doing it
see said compulsion above when i realize some days later im not doing it anymore ive stopped
stopping when for some ineffable reason i stop
i want to stop at the end of the page
What I’m Reading:
“Even as a young writer, I never said, ‘I want to reach a large audience. I want to be famous.’ It was more like ‘I want to do something as good as Beckett.’ I would have high ambition, but it was not for fame and glory. I don’t think you can chase after that…”
— Lydia Davis / “Why Lydia Davis Loves Misunderstandings” / New Yorker
follow myriad routes of varying lengths past aspens beeches cedars and larches it’s not required or conducive to spiritual reflection but how else would you see a hellbender or red eft or be attentive to the gentle sounds around you: breezes whipping through pine boughs birds chattering and choking on negativism the incessant buzz of overhead drones tides crashing on the shipwrecks of fortune the glug of rocky shores glutted in oil and red tide or the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of a child buried in rubble
take the path least trod for a change
What I’m Reading:
“No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches or in targeted direct actions, they cannot put their hands on the real flows of power, because they do not help produce it. They only consume.”
— Roy Scranton / Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
i did my good deed— rescued a painted turtle out of the roadway
i meddled with nature’s way— terrapin lives one more day
What I’m Reading:
“New German research data makes clear that cycling doesn’t just clear the air, it improves the society; if you bike, you start finding yourself more oriented to ‘the common good’”
— Harald Shuster, Jolanda van der Noll & Anette Rahmann via Bill McKibben / “Orientation towards the common good in cities: The role of individual urban mobility behavior” / Journal of Environmental Psychology
I am a 10-year veteran of disaster remediation. There is no reliable data for this operation. The operation has to be planned from scratch. Speak only in the most general terms. Reaveal nothing of value. This is so secret I can’t call my wife for 8 weeks. I face an even more dire situation than my predecessor. My steps squelch in this effluent. I crave a footfall that squishes. I want dynamic action and patriotic sacrifice. I loathe a fretful denouement. I fear the consequences. I remain determined … Yet undecided.
What I’m Reading:
“… the young man who refused police a description of the car that fired and sped away. As if to protect someone. As if his shooter were more a community than the police our country fashioned of itself.”
“Lord, I say, I am shaken; This mattress of dirt won’t bounce a bug. I used to sleep on ripples. Now I nap Where I drop in a pasture of odds and ends.”
“… even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears…”
— Lauren Groff / The Vaster Wilds
“Glück’s death marks a line break, but not a full stop, to a timeless voice in the art of poetry. It’s a voice that resonates with the wonder and grief of ancients like Sappho and moderns like Dickinson—in other words, like Louise Glück.”
— Srikanth Reddy / “In Remembrance of Louise Glück” / The Paris Review
“For what woman has not, walking in the dark of the street or along a path deep in the countryside, sensed the brutal imaginings of a man watching her from his hidden place, and felt the same chills chasing over her skin, and quickened her steps to get away?”
— Lauren Groff / The Vaster Wilds
“You’re not a creature in a body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity … … You see again how far away each thing is from every other thing.”
— Louise Glück / “Telescope”
“To be alone and surviving is not the same as being alive, she understood. And if she could in fact rouse herself to healing, if she could chase away the vulture of death, she would not choose this life that was shown to her, though the beauties of the world were without limit and the grace given to encounter more of them would have been an astonishing gift. Though there was satisfaction in the work of her body and her hands, though mere survival was a triumph, she understood now that the long loneliness of such a life she would never choose for herself.”
— Lauren Groff / The Vaster Wilds
“Concerning death, one might observe that those with authority to speak remain silent”
— Louise Glück / “Bats”
“It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world…”
— Lauren Groff / The Vaster Wilds
What I’m Listening To:
“I can dig it, he can dig it, she can dig it, we can dig it
They can dig it, you can dig it, oh, let’s dig it, come on, dig it for me, baby?”
Get thee behind me, New Hampshire— I’m back in my home state. You stand before me Massachusetts— I’m not a native son but happy adoptee. Bring the magic: flare— into your autumnal finery. I’ve earned a day off the bike— And a night (or two?) in my own bed.
What I’m Reading:
“living once again with all my joyous regrets for all I’ve done right or wrong, for all I am now, that is enough, yet not enough, for who I wanted to be once”
— Richard Blanco / “Once upon a Time: Surfside, Miami”
thee istsfor manity reader 