(The rock and snow poem of Pike’s Peak as Zebulon Pike might have seen it. Photo courtesy Destination 360.)
I have been running on about my once and future city of Detroit, the broad-shouldered steel stamping town of yore, and the destination for the big government convention early next month.
It is hard to concentrate on the state of that once-great place when I am looking out the window at the snow-capped mountains above The Springs in lovely Colorado. The air is crisp, the sun bright, and I can’t focus on The Motor City, so I won’t.
We got a full treatment of the shakes and bumps in United’s flight 995, a somewhat threadbare Boeing 757 that actually had enough legroom to be almost comfortable. The big front was rolling in over the National Capital Region, and it was one of those long days of travel that wound up as a pretty nice day.
Meetings today, and a flurry of communication to the Mother Ship this morning from the sixth floor of the Marriott on the wrong side of town leaves me without much to say. The President is going to talk about the deficit, finally, and maybe the Bowles-Simpson plan will be the template for trying to get out of this mess.
I will reserve judgment until I hear what he has to day, and how the battle-lines are drawn between the White House and Paul Ryan and the Tea Party members of the House Budget Committee.
I will watch with interest, as I imagine all of will with gas at $4 bucks a gallon, inflation running by some measures in double digits. That will wipe out savings, over time, and for all of us counting on fixed incomes from savings and pensions that is a bit of a terrifying prospect. We will just have to see what’s what.
So, with that I am going to punt on The Daily. Our great pal Bonds sent a fabulous poem yesterday. It is by a new poet named Cynthia Zarin. The epigraph at the start is from Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, whose main character is a guiding spirit throughout Zarin’s recounting of her own tale of impossible passion in The Ada Poems, her fourth collection.
Late Poem
” . . . a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern.”
I wish we were Indians and ate foie gras
and drove a gas-guzzler
and never wore seat belts
I’d have a baby, yours, cette fois,
and I’d smoke Parliaments
and we’d drink our way through the winter
in spring the baby would laugh at the moon
who is her father and her mother who is his pool
and we’d walk backwards and forwards
in lizard-skin cowboy boots
and read Gilgamesh and Tintin aloud
I’d wear only leather or feathers
plucked from endangered birds and silk
from exploited silkworms
we’d read The Economist
it would be before and after the internet
I’d send you letters by carrier pigeons
who would only fly from one window
to another in our drafty, gigantic house
with twenty-three uninsulated windows
and the dog would be always be
off his leash and always
find his way home as we will one day
and we’d feed small children
peanut butter and coffee in their milk
and I’d keep my hand glued under your belt
even while driving and cooking
and no one would have our number
except I would have yours where I’ve kept it
carved on the sole of my stiletto
which I would always wear when we walked
in the frozen and dusty wood
and we would keep warm by bickering
and falling into bed perpetually and
entirely unsafely as all the best things are
—your skin and my breath on it.
(New Yorker Cynthia Zarin. She is good. )
Vic