Suppose it were Friday cviii: breaking free

   Exactly when Thornhill broke
   free of the 3-legged race of
   what passes for politics, to
   enact his own leaps of faith
   in living life, was less in-
   teresting to the poll takers
   than why they weren't asked.
   


























Jack Mather

Ballots

 Who was it, who
 thought the in-
 nocent wouldn't
 also need to be
 called?

 From Houston to
 Kentucky, inno-
 cents were lost
 yesterday. This
 is handwriting,
 not limited up-
 on the wall. Is
 there a listen-
 er in the mech-
 anism?

        All of the songs Apollo sang alongside
        The listening river Eurotas who, blessed with the music,
        Commanded that his laurels learn them by heart,
        All these Silenius sang; the echoing valleys
        Echoed them up to the stars, till the Evening Star
        Said it was time for the flocks to come back in,
        Time to be counted, and time for him to set out
        Over a sky reluctant to yield the day.





















Virgil
Bucolica
The Eclogues
  VI, last stanza
David Ferry
  translation
Mid 30s BC
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999©

The grapes are off the vine in the Northern Hemisphere

 and in Virginia, 
 we just got past
 another election
 day -

 the one came too
 soon, the other,
 too late; but to
 be over the sus-
 pense is enough.

Blind chance

   Over the weekend I did some
   reading in the new Herodotus,
   listened to half of Haydn's
   Seasons, and watched a stun-
   ning motion picture from the
   80's by Kieslowski. 

   2 November is the birth date 
   of a friend who'd instantly 
   have seen the connections in 
   this recreation. A conscious-
   ness is not a lonesome stream. 
   To the ones who know our mind, 
   mark the day.

Michael Hoffman photography
Salmon Creek, Big Sur

Krzysztof Kieslowski
Przypadek / Blind Chance
Tor Studios, 1981©