Anesthetic

January 2, 2013 

There is no need to put down your pet so  it  “doesn’t suffer,” to be sold its death. Know this, death is its own anesthetic. Maybe you only get a chance to comfort; maybe you do. The best advice a vet ever gave, “stop going to the vet because that’s what was killing Violet Rays. She needed to know that I was committed to her life and the way I would demonstrate that was to keep her by my side.” Animal Person blog–

Jump States

Maybe what the poem says is more important than how it says it. That was the crux of my interaction and conflict with Donald Justice.
 He asked who did I like. I said Ferlinghetti. I had contact with both of these speakers in different ways.

“The nations have decided it says here to abolish themselves at last. It’s been decided at the highest level and at the lowest level to return to a primitive society, for science has conquered nature, but nature must not be conquered and machines must go after all their turning and turning” (Overpopulation). In the end  “the mouth of the world grows round with the sound”  is another statement of that by Donald Justice was an inferno at the time of Night Light.

Aborted Babies They Don’t Die

Ron Weddington, abort the poor
“A letter to Bill Clinton written by the co-counsel who successfully argued the Roe v. Wade decision urged the then-president-elect to “eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country” by liberalizing abortion laws. Ron Weddington, who with his wife Sarah Weddington represented “Jane Roe,” sent the four-page letter to President Clinton’s transition team before Clinton took office in January 1993.”

“He points to President Clinton and his soon-to-be first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton as the “perfect example.” “Could either of you have gone to law school and achieved anything close to what you have if you had three or four or more children before you were 20?” he asked. “No! You waited until you were established and in your 30’s to have one child. That is what sensible people do.”
“In 1967, during her third year of law school, Weddington faced an unplanned pregnancy with her partner Ron Weddington (whom she married in 1968), and traveled to Mexico for an illegal abortion.

She received her J.D. that same year, graduating in the top quarter of her class.” Sarah Weddington, Wikipedia

“In his postscript, Weddington said: “I was co-counsel in Roe v. Wade, [and] have sired zero children and one fetus, the abortion of which was recently recounted by my ex-wife in her book, “A Question of Choice” (Grosset/Putnam, 1992) I had a vasectomy in 1969 and have never had one moment of regret.”

Lion Calendar

Now the Mayan Calendar is defunct we have run out of organized time, scripted time, predicted time and enter an indefinite period of free time where, if not encapsulated with more divination, we live in freedom the best we can, as long as we don't divine it, for the divinations are a lie in that they prevent our more important reliance of Grace and Truth. Not responsible for the Rocky Mountains, we are responsible for ourselves. Not that there are not other ways of divining, but every telling is a fear of the future, relaxation of vigilance. Put aside your Tarot decks and I Ching, do away with palmistry and the planets as much as possible, since we are always looking at our hands and saying, what, me after we looked at Jupiter and the moon. Don’t go in the house or stay out. Forget the future and remember the past. This is the Lion Calendar.

Holy Ghost Cement

Hopkins left the world unchanged,
Need try some ooze of oil, shook
foil? Holy Ghost brood?
God’s Grandeur lives or dies,
We favor Herbert’s commands
read late, with one and all,
What falls between is vain,
words defend against bandits
vibrate with angels,
around those we love,
How else guard?
Yesterday I came to a house
an armed robber feared,
(“He guards the lives of his faithful ones”)
the old text  said, “Holy Father,
protect them by the power
of your Name, the Name you gave me.”
Up on a ladder with scaffold and boards,
the faith I am building
is the Name with the word.

Later on I will write as though I believed that words mean something, that they are palpable, a defense against entropy, armed bandits. By then I will mean it, set them as defenses, rings around those I love. They have a life of their own vibrating there, maybe like angels, but really they are more. How else can I guard these lives? See yesterday, but I write this as of 10 Nov, an armed robber appeared and there was no defense. In our town they are killing the police, who anyway, when I met them yesterday, seemed young and vulnerable compared to the hard case. I was troubled by my responsibility, for it is mine, to protect, but this morning I came on this phrase, “he guards the lives of his faithful ones” (Ps. 97.10) and with it an old note in the margin (Jn. 17.11) which said, “Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me” and above “I have revealed you [but it is really “your name”] to those whom you gave me out of the world” (6). You can read the whole paragraph, but one more, “while I was with them I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me.” I have begun barricades surrounding them. You will see me there maybe, the scaffolds, the ladders, the boards, brick, cement. I am building the Name out of the word.

Rooster

It’s still my watch. I have one red t shirt left, get it and go out the gate. He is still where he was scuttled aside, but beautiful in death, eyes closed, claws closed underneath as if on the roost, but not. Whose grave is this? I wrap him in the red shirt. He is heavy, maybe five pounds, carry him to the back to put him under the bushes in the hallowed ground where we have wept. I had cut mugwort to dry in a pot last week. It is dry. I break the bottom stems as a cushion, put him, covered with dry white leaves in the ground. It is the loss of life in strength that bothers most, the rulers as if they were “among  mugwort and other brushwood;– how is it that you cannot get them out of your mind?” I mark with a stone where a  ceramic bird waits to fly.

He that loves wisdom loves life and they that seek her early shall be filled with joy. She is of course wisdom, but she leads to love life, which leads to the rooster breathing its last in Ken’s drive, Ken who breathed his last in Oregon at the table in the middle of a breakfast conversation. It is life itself  our love comes from, knowing it. I spent many thoughtful minutes contemplating how to kill that rooster which perched each night in the aqua vitae beside the house and sang his even and morning song. But never would have done it, creep up with an air gun and pot shot him twenty feet up. All the branches would make a miss, and if hit that bird would make a racket to wake the dead. Once the baby chow I babysat chased him up the street with his short chubby legs churning, losing ground the whole way until he just stopped and turned around. That cock had fathered several sets of chicks on his once wide harem. He had once five hens. They all escaped from a mortgaged house. Then there were three. Sometimes the chicks nearly grew before their limp bodies were found on the setbacks. One lady fed this rooster and if he had roosted at her house things might have been better, but he didn’t, he came to me, but at the end his beauty, the red comb, black wings, yellow shoulders, more beautiful than any other couched on the drive this morning, didn’t run, barely breathing. I don’t know what happened. I mourn his crow, his stance, beauty, his being, his youth. That house was being painted. My companion said maybe he was poisoned. That’s what it looked. I feared to approach. Later the painters came and swept him aside. A family came to look at the house, stood around the body. Just when we think we have it we lose. My wish is that all roosters be remembered if I remember them. 26 Oct 2012

Single Favorite
The dentist wanted to know the single favorite. Rodin outside Paris, with all the marbles, never a black casting in sight. Months hunting the grave of Merlin in Wales. Was he historical. Merlin Ambrosius. Reconstruction of Taliesin. Time travel of 18th cent PA. 26 Sept 2012

Time Travel 23
Perhaps it’s just the time traveler can’t remember much. That’s why he writes. One thing we say of him, stay in shape and don’t take the interstices seriously. You may live among them but you are not one. They can’t tell. So pretend to walk. They do see you, but you are talking to what is not. The Ashkenazi Ukrainian potter of herbs who wrote ten million words, the Mennonite production potter, only the flaws of physics are real, and you know what they are. Right through walls. Time travelers get hungry, get tired. We recommend you keep a watch tuned to home time. Keep looking at it and add or subtract as the case may be.

Finding the Glasses
Whatever the merit of arguments made, proprieties in reviews, genre breaking, Fuller’s idea of miracles, mine, belief in God, pattern matching, what prayer might do, what is remembered, what forgotten [quite a lot of arguments], that is a rhetorical question in the last paragraph and its answer you give is too? You are speaking for yourself and I respect that. Now I am reminded by Pat that the glasses were in two pieces. The whole beach was just wiped out. Just the side of one buried lens caught the sun and I saw it. You couldn’t see anything without them. Then after a while one of the other kids found the rest of the frame and the other lens buried some distance off. So no I don’t think you would have found the glasses. What prayer did have to do with it was that it enabled a belief that they could be found, which seemed impossible, so we looked. So prayer enables you to look for the impossible, and faith is the will to believe the glasses can be found. To prove their finding is not a probability, but a certainty caused by prayer, not based on selecting cases of success to prove the point, seems like it would require proving that prayer changes the probability of events. Would such a successful experiment convince a skeptic that prayer is real and it works, that prayer is a much larger thing than probability? Maybe the most interesting thing is how the memory changes, not just in remembering the times or results but even the actual events. 19 Aug 2012