{"id":796,"date":"2011-04-13T15:45:47","date_gmt":"2011-04-13T15:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/?p=796"},"modified":"2011-04-13T15:46:11","modified_gmt":"2011-04-13T15:46:11","slug":"late-poem-and-pike%e2%80%99s-peak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/late-poem-and-pike%e2%80%99s-peak\/","title":{"rendered":"Late Poem and Pike\u2019s Peak"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

(The rock and snow poem of Pike\u2019s Peak as Zebulon Pike might have seen it. Photo courtesy Destination 360.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t focus on The Motor City, so I won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

We got a full treatment of the shakes and bumps in United\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s what.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Late Poem
\n\u201d . . . a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern.\u201d
\nI wish we were Indians and ate foie gras
\nand drove a gas-guzzler
\nand never wore seat belts
\nI\u2019d have a baby, yours, cette fois,
\nand I\u2019d smoke Parliaments
\nand we\u2019d drink our way through the winter
\nin spring the baby would laugh at the moon
\nwho is her father and her mother who is his pool
\nand we\u2019d walk backwards and forwards
\nin lizard-skin cowboy boots
\nand read Gilgamesh and Tintin aloud
\nI\u2019d wear only leather or feathers
\nplucked from endangered birds and silk
\nfrom exploited silkworms
\nwe\u2019d read The Economist
\nit would be before and after the internet
\nI\u2019d send you letters by carrier pigeons
\nwho would only fly from one window
\nto another in our drafty, gigantic house
\nwith twenty-three uninsulated windows
\nand the dog would be always be
\noff his leash and always
\nfind his way home as we will one day
\nand we\u2019d feed small children
\npeanut butter and coffee in their milk
\nand I\u2019d keep my hand glued under your belt
\neven while driving and cooking
\nand no one would have our number
\nexcept I would have yours where I\u2019ve kept it
\ncarved on the sole of my stiletto
\nwhich I would always wear when we walked
\nin the frozen and dusty wood
\nand we would keep warm by bickering
\nand falling into bed perpetually and
\nentirely unsafely as all the best things are
\n\u2014your skin and my breath on it.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n(New Yorker Cynthia Zarin. She is good. )<\/p>\n

Vic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(The rock and snow poem of Pike\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=796"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":803,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions\/803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}