The following words were lifted from my half-assed blog on Myspace. Few people ever read it, and now even fewer will.

dulce et decorum

The vast tangible intellectual wealth of this country should be stored in Upstate New York, far away from the areas so prone to natural (and popular) destruction.

Indeed - what more appropriate manner (dulce et decorum) for American museums, libraries, archives, and natural history collections to be treated than to fade away into neglected rust as has all of Upstate New York?

~~

harvest season, ii

Best to sow on distant property,
Best to raise it far from home
In other people's fields or, better yet,
To act as usufructuary in the confused ownership geographies
Of ravines and well-wooded creek-cut glens.

Best to keep all themes and topics as far away as possible.

~~

harvest season

As late Summer fades softly into Autumn, the helicopters are already
Flying low over the treetops and through the ravines and glens;
One has to wonder how pork belly futures are doing.

~~

...throw aways

Sir Edmund Hilary once commisioned an artist to create a honeycomb out of gold in the manner of the ancient Greek inventor/aviator Daedalus. The artist fashioned it and Hilary placed it in the garden, whereupon the bees instantly recognized the golden honeycomb as their own and immediately began filling it in with honey.

The Russian poet/translator Vladimir Pyast went 'stark raving mad' on stage in front of a rather large crowd while reading his recent translation of Edgar Allen Poe's 'Ullalume'.

The night sky this weekend was spectacular. The Milky Way was a long trail of high-atmospheric chimney smoke; the Pleiades Cluster was brilliant and clearly discernable.

~~

Fog sticks loosely to the tree-line;
The cool air settles along the smooth mounds between the deep plow furrows.

Another day of radio silence;
Lines of purple clouds on the horizon at dawn.

~~

again.

There are some who are astronomers most of the time. Or all of the time. One can use telescopes mounted upon imperceptibly slow gyros that adjust for the rotation of the Earth so that the unbearably distant objects of our interests do not fly out of our unbearably narrow field-of-view. Of course, many of us cannot afford such extravagances and must stick to the crudities of table-top telescopes designed for terrestrial use; telescopes weaker than Gallileo's own crudity. Others still must rely on the naked-eye and can only guess at those heavenly bodies that fill the pages of National Geographic or Sky & Telescope. Globular Clusters, Nebulae, Novas, Galaxies and Magellenic Clouds. With Celestial Charts in hand, they can only see what the ancient Greeks saw and make conjecture, divorced from the vivid realities the Greeks were able to utilize.

In a similar vein, imagine a comet hurtling across the Solar System on its predictable course toward pre-planned observation. Imagine a meteor or an asteroid in orbit between Mars and Jupiter - let us say Ceres - that wobbles on its irregular path and gives pause to Kepler's laws. Something along the line gets the shank and the aforementioned comet veers off its path and avoids the anxiously awaiting glances of those who had been expecting it. Even those heavenly bodies that promise a moment of joy away from the telescope swerve and elude us. The denizens return to their refractors and reflectors, their Dobsonians and their Cassegrains. And in the coming light of Dawn, those who never had such elaborate implements never knew what they missed.

~~

Of course, there is more to say about the various creeks that jump their streambeds and flow down muddy, stick-barbed floodways. There is more to say about the lamentations over dry streambeds and dying mosses in the shade clinging to still-moist formations of slate. But after heavy rains, creeks sometimes fail to appreciate the value of their paths, avoid the grand meander, and recklessly spill across thickets. Like fools.