uaelbaT Tableau

the lake,  where a swan

   floats

arm in arm  with its reflection

[--Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (1959)]

(For more on the poetry of mirrors, try this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/der-mann-ohne-eigenschatten.html )

U Rule, Phil

For a week  we have been shuddering beneath a Polar Vortex, which had somehow wandered so far south of its normal and proper ambit, it was as though you looked out your kitchen window and saw a Polar Bear.   Word on the street is  that the errant Vortex  is packing its bags  and heading back home. The morning mercury is revisiting double digits, though only barely. And now, on this glorious Groundhog Day, word comes from an unimpeachable and furry source, that Spring is just around the corner.

In honor of the triumphant annual return of Philippe de Punxsutawney (to give him his ancestral name), on today’s most joyous occasion, we offer a link to our musings on these lovable though chunky marmots:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/humble%20woodchuck

Phase-shift tableau

Now is the time    of the quarter-moon,

and in the jungle   the changes of the moon

bring   rain .  .   .

[--Peter Matthiessen, The Cloud Forest (1961), p.  242]

Glimpse

behind the smokescreen,

her narrowed   topaz  eyes  . . .

[--Mary McCarthy, The Group (1963) ]


For comparison:
https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2018/04/women-wisps.html

Splendor

the sun   was proud    in the south

[--Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001)]

MLK-Day Monostich

I’ve been spending the holiday weekend  alternately working through the second volume of Taylor Branch’s magisterial trilogy-biography of M. L. King, and (while resting the eyes) taking in an audiobook of Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid-conspiracy novel Bleeding Edge.

The two works could scarcely be more different; yet, in a familiar phenomenon, co-temporal intake produces bouillabaisse-style mental blends.

Thus:  Branch’s historical-archival work  is straightforward in approach, and sober in style -- he is no phrase-maker -- yielding almost nothing by way of “found poetry” or excerptable monostichs.  Yet here is one line that could have sprung from Pynchon’s pen:

A slow tide of crisis

spread pressures  and counterpressures

to odd places

at great remove.

Emploi du temps

All night long,  the snowbunnies

whiz and whisper,

over the silent

                shining

                    snow . . . . .

Meteorological Monostich

North of Thirty-fourth Street,

a gray cloud

was beginning to encompass

the Empire  State  Building.

“It’s going    to  rain,”

I

said …

[ -- Mickey Spillane, The Erection Set (1972)]