Bowling a-Go-Go

Last night at Leisure Time Bowl, hidden deep within the bowels of the Port Authority (actually, it was on the 2nd Floor), certain members of the Grand Marquis Coterie gathered to push pink bowling balls down a smoothed-out surface for the expressed purpose of well, I really don't know.

The highlights:

Category A member Modigliani (employing the pseudonym "Chachhhhhhhhhhhhhi") got out of the gates pretty fast, notching a couple of strikes and clearing pins as though she had just spent the last week on the Ladies' Professional Bowlers Tour. Make no mistake about it: Modigliani is a total mercenary in multi-colored, yet very tasteful, bowling shoes.

Category A member Rivera, christened with the nickname "Da Fonz" (what else could it possibly be?) looked especially cute.

Category A member Lothes, after protesting the nickname blessed upon her ("My Humps"), played well enough to maintain second place for most of the match; however, her level of play dropped during the most critical of frames, and ended up in third place.

Unfortunately, no member managed to break the 100-point barrier, which could only mean that Modigliani, Lothes, and Rivera were all severely inebriated, or that they simply have no athletic talent to speak of.

The scores, kind sir:

Chachhhhhhhhhhhhhi: 97
Da Fonz: 86
My Humps: 84

The Pretty Redhead

Behold me before all a man of good sense
Knowing life and death what a living man can know
Having experienced the griefs and the joys of love
Having been able to assert his ideas on occasion
Knowing several languages
Having travelled a good bit
Having seen the war in the Artillery and Infantry
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost his best friends in that frightful struggle
I know of the old and of the new as much as one man alone can know of them
And without being uneasy today about this war
Between us and for us my friends
I pronounce judgment on this long quarrel of tradition and innovation
Of Order and Adventure

You whose mouths are made in the image of God's
Mouths which are order itself
Be indulgent when you compare us
To those who have been the perfection of order
We who seek everywhere for adventure
We are not your enemies
We wish to appropriate vast and strange domains
Where flowering mystery offers itself to whoever wishes to pick it
There are new fires there and colors never yet seen
A thousand imponderable phantasms
To which reality must be given
We would explore goodness a vast country where everything is silent
There is also time which one can banish or call back
Pity us who fight always in the front lines
Of the limitless and of the future
Pity our errors pity our sins

Behold the return of summer season of violence
And my youth died like the spring
O Sun it is the time for flaming Judgement

And I wait

To follow forever the sweet noble form
It assumes in order that I may love it alone
It comes and it attracts me as a magnet does the needle

It looks for all the world like
My redhead darling my beloved

Her hair is really gold you'd say
A flash of lightning which endures
Or flames which dance a proud pavane
In roses as they slowly fade

But laugh laugh long at me
Men from everywhere above all men of this place
For there are so many things I dare not tell you
So many things you will not let me say
Have pity on me


--Guillaume Apollinaire (translated by Michael Benedikt)

Haiku by Shirao

The First Day of the Year;
Under the protection of a big tree,
People’s hearts are at rest.

The long chin performer!
It is New Year's Day!

The sound of a flute,
On a moonlit night
of mid-January.

Already in February!
Scattered soot
in my kitchen.

A rainy night
Of the Doll’s Festival;
Only the smell of candles.

The spring wind;
A hire hand
Is scattering ash.

Yearning fills my heart
When the candles are lit;
Cherry blossom fall.

A butterfly
Is floating
Above the cleaned up sink.

Calamus bath water:
Leaves of the calamus coming
Close to my nipple.

Making a sound,
The camellia fell
On the tatami mat.

In the dark garden
Of the night,
The peony remains quiet.

Among the grasses
Of passing autumn,
the stream hides itself.

To the setting sun
The scarecrow's face
Is indifferent.


*The Doll's Festival is an annual event for girls held on March 3, when people wish little girls will be happy and grow healthily.

*Japanese would often take a bath with leaves of a calamus floated on bath water on May 5, the day of the Boy's Festival, so as to exercise a kind of exorcism.

"Who's On First?"

In honor of the arrival of yet another Spring Training in Major League Baseball (Yankees' pitchers and catchers are scheduled to report today at Legends Field in Tampa), here is a poem by Donald Hall called "Ninth Inning," from his series, "Baseball."

P.S. Play close attention to this fifth stanza, which reveals not a little bit about the new poet laureate's thoughts on writing programs (such as the one in which we found ourselves).

(This piece was originally published in AGNI [issue 36], and followed in the full-length book, The Museum of Clear Ideas.)

The Ninth Inning by Donald Hall 1. My dog and I drive five miles every morning to get the newspaper. How else do I find out, when the Sox trade Smoky Joe Wood for Elizabeth Bishop? He needs persistent demonstration of love and approval. He cocks his head making earnest pathetic sounds. Although I praise his nobility of soul, he is inconsolable 2. when I lift my hand from his ear to shift: Even so, after the reading, the stranger nods, simpers, and offers to share his poems with me. Dean Gratt confided, at the annual Death and Retirement Gala: “Professor McCormick has not changed: A Volvo is just a Subaru with tenure.” Catchers grow old catching, which is strange 3. because they squat so much. “The barn is burning, O, the barn is burning on the hill; the cattle low and blunder in their stalls; the horses scream and hurl their burning manes.” Jennifer remains melancholic. Do you start to feel, Kurt, as if you’re getting it? I mean baseball, as in the generations of old players hanging on, the young 4. coming up from Triple A the first of September, sitting on the bench or pinch-running, ready for winter’s snow-plowing and cement-mixing, while older fellows work out in their gyms or cellars, like George “Shotgun’’ Shuba who swung a bat against a tethered ball one thousand times a day, line-drives underneath his suburban ranchhouse. 5. By 2028, when K. C. turned one-hundred, eighty-three percent of American undergraduates majored in creative writing, more folks had MFA’s than VCR’s, and poetry had passed acrylic in the GNP. The NEA offered fellowships for destroying manuscripts and agreeing: “Never 6. to publish anything jagged on the right side of the page, or ever described as ‘prose poems.’” Guerillas armed with Word Perfect holed in abstract redoubts. Chief-of-Staff Vendler mustered security forces (say: Death Squads) while she issued comforting reports nightly on lyric television. Hideous shepherds sing to their flocks 7. under howling houses of the dog. At the Temple Medical Center in New Haven I wait. My mother at eighty-six goes through the Upper and Lower GI again. My mind jangles, thinking of my sick son in New York and his sick one-year-old girl. This afternoon, if the X-rays go all right, I drive back to New Hampshire. 8. In New Hampshire, late August, the leaves turn slowly, like someone working to order—protesting, outraged—and fall as they must do. The pond water stays warm but the campers have departed. By the railroad goldenrod stiffens; asters begin a late pennant drive in front of the barn; pink hollyhocks wilt and sag like teams out of the race. 9. No Red Sox tonight, but on Friday a double-header with the Detroit Tigers, my terrible old team, worse than the Red Sox who beat the Yankees last night while my mother and I watched —the way we listened, fifty years back— sprightly ghosts playing in heavy snow on VHS 30 from Hartford, and the pitcher stared at the batter.

Edgy roll

oink

Many times you wake up/in February make-up...

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

--Pablo Neruda