I had an exchange with a friend several weeks ago on the tearing down of statues; we only wrote to one another, at first, in poems, and we wrote our poems in under an hour, so excuse us the flaws in our work. I offer it to you here as an interruption in programming, before the event recedes too much in the rearview mirror.

I am not an iconoclast, although I wholeheartedly endorse removing statues to Confederate generals and those whose purpose was wrapped up in the institution of slavery. This trend can, of course, go far past the original target. I feel this awkward need simultaneously to apologize for the poem and to explain it and even (at least in part) to justify it.

Here are the poems; I will say a few words of explanation after them. Continue reading →

Loki has nothing on Aphrodite;

the real trickster can start the siege of Ilium

and have you teary-eyed looking at old pictures

Continue reading →

Preparation protects us from being sneak-attacked

by the long slog of work-over-time; Continue reading →

“Nothing concentrates the mind so much as –”

our demise: the only inevitability we’ll never experience as an actuality;

but to hold one’s mortality in one’s hands, Continue reading →

Psychosoma hypostatic monism

(the pendulum swings, but its axis is one)

the mind is a body, the body: digestive tract

with a support cast of organs (like thumbs

and brains); “Let us read, mark, and inwardly di-gest”;

Continue reading →