I wrote this a long time ago. I was thinking about the poet Vachel Lindsay and was reminded of this. I wrote it for a class his son Nick taught.
Lottie played
Luigi’s game,
Paid in queer
And split for Maine.
Brady was
Luigi’s shill:
Took his pay
In phony bills.
When he saw
The bread was phony,
Sent it off
For alimony
To his old lady,
Lottie Brady.
You know that feeling when you’re out with friends and you’ve had a few and you need to visit the bathroom and you thread the path through the tables like Mick Jagger on stage and you’re conscious of how your feet are gripping the floor and how soon you have to think about turning in order to make that corner and you feel as alive as an Indy 500 driver dodging a pileup and you nod knowingly to a server on the way and you know she had to be thinking how cool is he but you are entirely focused on the mission and you find the room flawlessly and turn the knob on the first try and you’re in and to the appointed spot with an absolute minimum of steps and execute perfectly and you think I know it’s just going to the bathroom but nobody’s ever done it better than I just did and isn’t it really about the present moment and you think I wonder if I can explain this to my friends at the table? Well you can’t.
The world is white and intricate on these morning walks. Beneath the frosted branches, the path down to the river is strewn with gleaming points of red, blue, green, as though the dew has frozen in droplets so tiny that each one can reflect only one color of the spectrum. Frost heaves have ruffled the ground, bringing rocks to the surface, stony buds breaking the earth, betokening some cycle other than the seasons.
This committed feminist looks forward to a dizzying ride. Tonight I begin the second play in my Year of Reading Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew. My guide in all of this is the big Shakespeare book by Harold Bloom, a devotee of Bardolatry and avowed feminist himself, but for this particular play I have also in the back of my mind Naomi Wolf’s account of a “sexual encroachment” by Bloom when she was his student at Yale.
Anthony Cangiano is my blogging guru. He literally wrote the book on technical blogging. But it’s not his fault I don’t post more often. I think this blog is going to have a higher priority for me this year, so I may be posting more regularly. A key to making that happen, though, will be scheduling blog posts.