Epiphany

Insurgents
Resurgents
Terrorists
Rejectionists
Saddamists
Sodomists
Secessionists
Recessionists
Recidivists
Projectionists

To hell in a handbag,
Or was that Baghdad?
Maybe a hand basket,
Or just a Badghasket.

Windward

Seems to be little doubt that Woodward has had his finger in the dyke of fourth estate credibility for years now. From his early days in naval costume, apparently all he ever really wanted was to be included at the dinner table—certainly not to snoop around in the galley to see how they prepared what they were feeding him. I suspect Bernstein would corroborate his partner’s stenographic skills but perhaps not much about connecting any dots. What does Bradlee think? Was Woodward’s ambition always simply to be embedded (even before the concept was coined) in the security blanket of established power? The Watergate generation of journalists is now faced with unmasking the masters of subterfuge who seem to have swallowed many of them up in "the mystique of the White House," unwittingly or not. And yet now they find themselves as pawns swept up in a grand illusion designed by Roving insiders to distract us not only from executive avarice but, alas, from the many other crushing issues of the day that continue to fester from malignant neglect.

Pond

A pond
A leaf
A tree
A sunlit ripple
Reflecting all that
And more than
You could have
Ever imagined
Had you not
Been there
To see it.

Proof

The proof is in the pudding,
They say, but I think sometimes
The pudding is in the proof.
You know, like poof
There goes the roof,
Or, you’re so aloof
When you’re in Tartuffe.

It’s like they say
When you’re in the way,
Oh, Maybe he’s just gay,
And then go on to pray
For yet another day
Out there in the hay
With Ray.

Ashbery

Reading Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker article on John Ashbery as the climactic scene in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is playing out on TV in the background – the scene in which earth scientists and aliens play their electronic music back and forth trying to communicate. Somehow this seems to be an apt sensory analogy of what MacFarquhar is saying about Ashbery’s own sensory (and intellectual) experience of the world around him as well as poetry – how he reads it and how he writes it. And the visitors from outer space pick Dreyfuss’s character, the innocent, guileless, curious, receptive, unformulated linesman to go with them instead of the scientists, with their structured preconceptions (and pretensions). Ashbery is a pneumatic revelation.

Coma

Is it too much to hope for that Mr. Reid has managed at last to stir Democratic lawmakers from their inexplicable coma and dissect the Republican cancer that has been eating us all alive now for too many years. Grab your balls, Senators, rip out their lying eyes and forked tongues and disgorge their extended bellies of all the corrupted lard they have been feeding on before this country is ancient history.