‘… Still With You.’

From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450

‘… I rose up and am still with you.’

Psalm 139: 18

‘Let Him Not Lose What He So Dear Hath Bought.’

From Cell 25 of the Convent of San Marco, by Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), 15th Century

Think on the very làmentable pain,

Think on the piteous cross of woeful Christ,

Think on His blood beat out at every vein,

Think on His precious heart carvèd in twain,

Think how for thy redemption all was wrought:

Let Him not lose what He so dear hath bought.

–Pico della Mirandola (translated by St Thomas More)

‘… Wounded for Our Iniquities …’

From the Armadio degli Argenti of Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), c. 1450

‘… he was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our sins….

Isaiah 53: 5

Potter Young and Old

My Pronouns

My pronouns are he, him, and his
Because I’m in the sperm-making biz
Or at least I was
Till I met Dr. Buzz
And now all I’ve got is plain jiz.

But the I and the Thou are the ones
That make me wanna shoot off my guns
For the love of Buber
When I’m catching an Uber
And hitting the driver with puns.

When I Was Broke

The Keillor Treatment

Inauguration Day

Reruns

Rerun of a poem from House of Words and Mary Karrs birthday featured today on the rehabilitated Writer’s Almanac.

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, January 16, 2021

becoming myself
could actually happen
i believe it could

on a rainy day
as leaves fall and paste themselves
to pavements and feet

walking familiar
paths to places known too well
shod in shoes worn out

if i were a rich man
counting money like syllables
then maybe i could rest

in increasing luxury
like a poem forming line by line
instead of worrying time

but i am more like
a haiku stanza falling
into line with you

and wishing i could
become myself with vengeance
and take you with me

https://korrektivpress.com/2020/11/32001/

My dad gave me

My dad gave me
The history
Of future things
That he could see

And when I saw
The fatal flaw
He showed how mercy
Breaks the law

My mom and I

My mom and I
Flew through the sky
Towards the sun
On wings of why

We circled high
And in her eye
Some kindness answered
To my cry

Sig Line

Martin Buber
Philosopher
Pronouns: I, thou

Unto Us a Book

What the Sky Lacks

coming soon

This Letter to You

We were poets once and young…

…or younger, anyway.

Desktop5So JOB was visiting the Dappled Things website, as one does, and he stumbled across this in the “featured poem of the day” department: a little ditty he composed a while back for some M.L. character…

Screen Shot 2017-02-08 at 11.18.37 AMI do so love “ogling theologians.”

[Image: Gargoyles at Notre Dame, and the Café Grotesque mascots they inspired.]

It’s Walker Percy’s Hundredth Birthday and We Suck

… but here’s the beginning of an epic poem about the time a young man met the man himself:

November 22, 1989

The day I met Walker, the rain had fallen
in Louisiana sheets, and I’d left
my tent illicitly pitched in the Bogue Falaya
State Park, along with a bookish bottle
of Early Times I’d taken a few swigs off of
in the dark the night before as pine cones pitched
and fell outside as if in triadic morse code
from Flannery in heaven telling me grace was in
the river. And alligators, too, I reckoned.
I walked the cracked sidewalks of Covington, aimlessly,
dazed by the wonder of seeing vines sprouting
through the cracks in a sacramental vision,
a concelebration of the namer and the named,
and lept across the flashflood puddles
as I made my way towards no destination
but found myself in The Kumquat bookstore
to oggle shelves bursting with signed copies
of The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot,
The Second Coming, The Thanatos Syndrome, Lost
in the Cosmos, The Message in the Bottle, books
that had changed (and continue to change) my life.
Oh Walker (Oh Rory) I was twenty-four
and pining for a woman I was also
on the run from in triangular
despair (yet thanks in part to you I also
was aware, at least a little — a foothold —
of the despair, contrary to that Kierkegaardian
epigraph, precisely pitched though it is).
Oh Walker: so I bought a stack of books,
some for me and some for those I loved,
and left instructions with the keeper of
the store to have you encode, in your
physician’s scrawl, your cracked prescriptions
where the vines of love and truth might grow from bourbon
and ink, the cumulative bliss of limitation,
where you and I might clear a space for being.

I Don’t Wanna Go to Mass

Something Potter came up with after his daughter said she didn’t want to go to mass. Apparently he was trying to one-up her in the anti-mass department.