52/210: Pluming the Depths

[rejectomorph]

My last purchase from Safeway I got some very disappointing fruit, the sort that goes bad before it gets fully ripe. I guess fruit season is over. There was some really good stuff earlier, including what I consider the three best plums I've ever eaten. There were also some very good nectarines. There's no guarantee I'll be around next year (and in fact I've been feeling so crappy of late that I think it very likely that I won't) so I'm glad I at least got that stuff while it was good. It's too bad none of the stores sell casaba melons anymore. I would like to have had one of those. I think the last one I had was at least ten years ago. No idea why they vanished from the market.

But none of that is important. It's all taking place on an unimportant planet out on a spiral arm of an insignificant galaxy that has only a few billion years left to live. Why would the cosmos give a rat's ass? Why would any of it, or all of it, bring even a slight pause in the relentless march of that cosmos to the inevitable oblivion of absolute zero? Of course not! So why should I care? Well, they were very tasty plums. I will remember them until I die, and I am the sole arbiter of what is important to me So the universe can go bugger itself. Which is precisely what (I am sure) it is doing. So hooray for plums, and for...

Sunday Verse


The Hunt in the Forest

by John Burnside


How children think of death is how the shadows
gather between the trees: a hiding place
for everything the grown-ups cannot name—
Nevertheless, they hurry to keep their appointment
far in the woods, at the meeting of parallel lines,
where everything is altered by its own
momentum — altered, though we say transformed —
greyhound to roebuck, laughter to skin and bone;
and no one survives the hunt: though the men return
in threes and fours, their faces blank with cold,
they never quite arrive at what they seem,
leaving a turn of phrase or a song from childhood
and waiting, while their knives slip through the blood
like butter, or silk, until the heart is still.