With the outrage meter pegged post-Katrina, much to my (almost physical) discomfort—and feeling lately, again, that it makes very little difference whether or not this particular patch of the blog commons gets tilled or not—I've been going through another spasm of Blog Aversion. Not sure where it'll end up: I could come through with half a dozen posts in short order (I've certainly had that many on my mind lately), or I could continue to be seized with that stone-in-the-gut sensation every time I contemplate opening my HTML editor. Though the fact that I've been thinking posts through in my head means that posts will likely get written again, to whatever small avail, more or less regularly before too long.

Meanwhile, if you're into this sort of thing, here's a recent poem, in the orphic-elegy vein. It's in no sense a poem that's about Katrina/New Orleans, or even that attempts to make reference, but uncontrollably there's a lot of flood imagery that's been getting into my writing lately.

Your average correspondent moves
from being born again to being
undone:  that's the power
of the waves.  They have nothing
in mind but they are all
you know.  Like you
they swing between design
and indifference.  Be patient
with them:  if this were your
only skill, to be cast
down, where do you think your appetites
would leave you?  Like two
houses, one dry and one
wet, like the paranoid crowd
that follows you:  like the storm
as it flings hosannas
into the sky, this is all the damage
you'll ever do.  Take a good
look around.  That's your picture
being torn up and
dispersed.  From this point on
you are just your community
of mourners.  There may be days
yet of uncertainty, but on the streets
of this sodden town
this is the only game going.
You are as incomplete
now as the waves
always promised you'd be.

posted by michael  1:42:18 PM  
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