52/160-161: Cooked
Jul. 13th, 2025 02:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rejectomorphCooking in hot weather is exhausting. Doing anything in hot weather is exhausting, but cooking is especially exhausting. Especially for a stupid old guy who was never a good cook and has forgotten half of what he ever knew about cooking anyway. Anyway, after two days of being mostly comatose I was ready to eat something actually cooked, and so I did that thing and it was not entirely catastrophic, but as I said, exhausting. Now I'm ready to go to sleep again and, ye gods, look at the hour! How do I get myself into this sort of thing? (Here's another mess I've gotten me into!) Well fine. I hope this iced tea I'm drinking to counteract the horrendous heat doesn't keep me awake. But it probably will.
Sunday Verse
by Fanny Howe
For Peter S.
I saw the shrouds of prisoners
like baptismal gowns
buried outside the cemetery.
On the canvas frills exhaled
singed wool and cardboard.
The angels arrived as lace.
Took notes, then stuck. Awful residue
from a small cut.
•
The veil has been ripped from the skin
where it was burned in.
The skin is the veil, the baby-material,
imprinted on, as if
one dropped the handkerchief
and it was one’s wrist.
The cuff is frightening.
Stuffed onto oil.
Water-stains might fence its ghost in.
•
“The barbed wire complex”
I understand.
Winged and flattened
at the same time, poor things!
Some leftover specters of blood.
Remember Blake’s figures like columns
with heads
looking around for God?
When events are not as random
as they seem.
•
The article of clothing
is only half there, it’s not full,
but when it falls forward, it is.
Terrible emptiness of the spread
neckline and little sleeve.
Half-cooked squares.
Was this religious fire
and is this where it passed?
Maybe they are floating on water
of paint, pool-sized,
blue and ridged like foam.
You would have to fly
to see them flat as a map.
The rib and hem. Rained on
for eons. Noah’s children’s
floating forms.
•
Angels die?
It’s a frightening-miracle
because here they are.
The Upper God
has let them drop
like centuries into space.
And I recognize them!
Fanny Howe died July 9 at the age of 84. Here is one of her poems that has appeared with a number of memorial posts. It seems apropos:
[I won't be able to write
from the grave]
I won't be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed—
and the short northern nights.
Sunday Verse
What Did You See?
by Fanny Howe
For Peter S.
I saw the shrouds of prisoners
like baptismal gowns
buried outside the cemetery.
On the canvas frills exhaled
singed wool and cardboard.
The angels arrived as lace.
Took notes, then stuck. Awful residue
from a small cut.
•
The veil has been ripped from the skin
where it was burned in.
The skin is the veil, the baby-material,
imprinted on, as if
one dropped the handkerchief
and it was one’s wrist.
The cuff is frightening.
Stuffed onto oil.
Water-stains might fence its ghost in.
•
“The barbed wire complex”
I understand.
Winged and flattened
at the same time, poor things!
Some leftover specters of blood.
Remember Blake’s figures like columns
with heads
looking around for God?
When events are not as random
as they seem.
•
The article of clothing
is only half there, it’s not full,
but when it falls forward, it is.
Terrible emptiness of the spread
neckline and little sleeve.
Half-cooked squares.
Was this religious fire
and is this where it passed?
Maybe they are floating on water
of paint, pool-sized,
blue and ridged like foam.
You would have to fly
to see them flat as a map.
The rib and hem. Rained on
for eons. Noah’s children’s
floating forms.
•
Angels die?
It’s a frightening-miracle
because here they are.
The Upper God
has let them drop
like centuries into space.
And I recognize them!
Fanny Howe died July 9 at the age of 84. Here is one of her poems that has appeared with a number of memorial posts. It seems apropos:
[I won't be able to write
from the grave]
I won't be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed—
and the short northern nights.
