So how's the weather?

High summer is a fleeting time.
And the pleasant coming of autumn
is the coming of a going.

Against the darkened purple sky,
and the strident columns of light,
and the empty bells,
winter settles,
staid but alarming,
like a slow slap.
And it lasts, bare,
it lasts and lasts. In its absent
presence it is completely
present
as if there were an internal relation
between the concept of desolation
and that of eternity.

In the Ivy by the Staircase

Last spring
Sandi squatted beside the staircase,
squirt pistol in hand,
as squirrels bounded past through the ivy
like breakdancers doing the snake.
Sandi had donned a purple sundress,
left her shoulders exposed,
and as class let out she
crouched, like someone from the FBI might crouch,
to ambush her crush.

I wondered whether

we might commune with those who experience
utter loneliness
by ourselves experiencing it,
like monks rising in the night
to pray for the sleepless.
Or is it of the nature of being
utterly alone
that when one experiences it
one communes with no one?

Sometimes Philosophers Wax Poetical Too

Korsgaard on the idea that emotions are perceptions of reasons:

'I want to emphasize a feature of perception that philosophers do not always attend to: namely, that it is not just a way of knowing, not just an epistemic state, but a way of being in the presence of its object. For I think that is why we place a high value on the emotions, even the negative emotions, and feel that we aren't really alive unless we feel them. To have an emotion is to stand in the presence of a normative fact: to feel fear is to stand in the presence of the dangerousness of danger; to feel grief is to stand in the presence of the infinite loss of death.'

Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth?

While the other two servants doubled the amount that had been entrusted to them while their master was away, this servant took his talent and buried it in the ground, and he did this out of fear that otherwise the talent might be lost. When the master returned, this talent too was taken from him and given to one of the other servants who had doubled what had been entrusted to him. And the master said that everyone who has will be given more, and whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.

Was there a secret kindness in the master's harsh words? Did he withdraw the servant's talent, knowing that this particular servant was beset by many fears, not so that he would have nothing but so that he would be anxious over nothing?

Make Yourself Immortal

Over breakfast I spoke to a man
who asked himself:
Why does he love women?
It has to do with mortality.
Some people fear death all their lives.
He fears never living.
And when you have a wife
and a mistress
it is as if you have two lives.
And at sunset with a man
who marveled about some old boy
from Augusta who was talking about his wife.
He asked him: was that your only one?
Yep, his only wife for 30 years.
Now, a lot of people have only one wife.
But this man also had only one job
for 30 years.

And I didn't know who between them
knew something about immortality.

Another Time?

Will you greet me again barefoot,
a glass of shandy in hand
all lit up by the last of the evening light?
And suggest one more time
after another meal
that we play a game of hearts?
Maybe next summer,
or in some summer to come.

Outside the First Unitarian Church

David knelt and photographed flowers
outside the First Unitarian Church.

Reverse Lottery: Willing to Play the Odds?

What if instead of paying for a ticket that might win big, you got paid to take a ticket that might cost you? Would you be willing to get paid $10 for the 1/1000 chance that you might have to pay $10,000? Come on, what are the odds it would happen to you? And just think what you can get with $10!

Bathroom Scrawl

I was perplexed by a dialogue a saw yesterday in the ladies washroom. One woman had written, 'You are beautiful' and another had replied, 'So are you.'

Assuming that the notes had been written at different times, it was tempting to think that the two women had commented on one another's good looks without having seen each other! Had they known each other from elsewhere and used the stall to convey their message? When the first woman wrote, 'You are beautiful,' did she already have the second in mind, and did the second sense that this compliment was especially directed towards her?

All of this seemed unlikely and so I set about finding another explanation of the dialogue. And in order to do this, I turned to the idea of 'inner beauty,' a beauty of the soul. Still, if the women had not met, how had they been able to evaluate the beauty of one another's souls?

I decided to work my way backwards from the second woman's remark. She must have reasoned thusly: it is a beautiful soul who is able to see the beauty in others, and thus the woman who wrote this remark about the beauty of others must herself be beautiful. The second woman had something to go on: that her stall scrawl interlocutor was one able to see the beauty in others.

But this left me perplexed about the note of the first woman that simply read, 'You are beautiful.' For even if she meant something about inner beauty, how did she know this was true? How did she know it would apply to the person who found herself crouching and squinting in front of it? What's more, this worry threatened to undo my explanation of the second woman's remark, since if the first woman had merely attributed beauty to others (perhaps falsely) rather than seeing it there, then she was no more than a flatterer and the second woman's admiration of her inner beauty was again unfounded.

Then I seized on the idea that the claim of the first woman was not a claim known through experience at all, but known a priori through her concept 'woman'. To be a woman *is* to be beautiful. The first woman saw beauty in each woman who came into the stall not as a matter of experience and observation, but as a matter of seeing actuality under the guise of ideality.

Feeling that I had understood the exchange, I left the ladies room quite satisfied with myself, feeling beautiful and determined to see the beauty in others.

Lo Now

Hey listen:
I've been listening,
as you've been shuffling,
shushing and hushing,
to that sweet sound
you've been whistling
and the rhythm of
corduroy between your thighs.

Hey mister,
you've been missing
while I've been missing
what you're dishing:
something like heroine,
something like booze,
like a mother's laugh
or a witch's giggle.

Lo now.
Low now.
Lo, low low
now:
hold me
like you held me,
like you never felled me,
like you never loved me
in the name of timber,
in the nick of time.

We've got the game for you

Are you frustrated with those games that seem simple at first but that leave you, at death, still feeling that mastery has eluded you? At our house we've got the game for you! More than a minute to learn; less than a lifetime to master.

Harper Library

You left your blue tutu
and your computer
in the afternoon sunlight
where silence does have a sound,

hums among
chandeliers and paintings
of presidents
and books and books.
Oh, books, books!

Pictured you as my pretty
blue bride, pirouetting
with the netting cast
as bright shadow across your face,

looked across the aisle
and saw this title:
'Heaven: A History'
just next to
'The Decline of Hell.'

Your browser dreamed
of Barcelona.
Let's away to Europe.
Let's study abroad.

Winter Picnics

Janie I remember
that winter
when you padded deliberately
through the library in your black tights,
one set of toes exposed,
like you had learned to live there
in the spirit of an unending pajama party,
a sober, academic orgy.
I watched your feet feel the floor
and asked you to meet me at my
electric kettle, all the way
back in the stacks, in that magic fairy
forest where monstrous minds might
lurk behind every dusty, gilded tome.
Those rows humbled us,
silent and sublime,
overwhelming us with the sheer volume
of their volumes of thought and
unthought, alike published, left unsorted.
Janie, do you remember how
I wore my facial hair ironically?
How my mustache was named
'The Admiral' and was widely admired,
giving even critics an impression
of financial stability?
You said when I touched you that my
hands were awfully soft,
awfully soft for someone who passed
at a glance for a lumberjack.
And my pale fingers left your pale body
full of awe. Full of awe.
I tell you I can never forget that winter
of indoor picnics, windowless
basement cafes across campus where I would meet you
with a bag of glass containers.
We chopsticked grated carrots in ginger sauce
from the same bowl
and spread from a slab of brie
onto crispy cookies.
Janie, lately I've begun to doubt the veracity
of the lament that
you live life forward but understand it in reverse.
For I have suspected now that with our parents
as children we did understand all of life
and that what is gained in the living
is just living, as we watch ourselves become
what we understood from the start.

Drops and Doses

Drops and doses

must be taken twice daily.

You will feel spoonfuls of illness

and spoonfuls of cure,

unsure which is wise and what is ailing.

Should you conquer the world,

should you save it or change it,

may you feel in your gut

the ebullience of medicine,

of fantastic projects thought up

but unexecuted,

of your hand on the wheel

of a creaking car on a country road,

the flying assurance that life is surely yours

and the even assessment

that it probably is not.

How is it that this can be so fascinating

and yet so difficult to endure?