To Her Dear Mountains

This was posted on the CCAN blog on 08 Feb 2008

Had we but world enough, and time,
This patience, ladies, were no crime.
Thou in the shade of Old Rag Mountain
Should lilies find; I by the fountain
of the Potomac would complain.
We could dance on fields of green
and trust Dominion to clean their steam,
Blithely prancing in their hot air
And on blather that they make fair.

Our love would never be stained
By the blast of Dominion’s reign
Or buried by the waste of mining
For the coal to fuel the shining
Of incandescent lights and energy
Wasted, to cause your injury.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Destroyed and ravaged mountain sides
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
But arsenic and lead surround.

Now let us sport us while we may;
And pledge with our hearts on display
And join with all to write a Valentine
to Governor Kaine to stop their mine
and penetrate the walls of Dominion’s
Long-preserved hegemony.
And we will win despite the money
Because if we roll our strength and all
Our love up into one huge ball
We tear apart the iron gates
of power and find more beautiful fates.

Lock the top door with the key with no tape
The gate key says “gate”
The front door key says “front”
But I’m not done closing down yet.
The basement key doesn’t work, so lock it, and then close the locked door.

No decisions, strait down 14th and end up on the National Mall, parked, next to the fat security guard driving an SUV.

2 tourists hold hands, the third laughs with them
A man lounges with his leg up and arm stretched out over the bench
Trash cans, green lawn, Washington monument towers over, and the capitol presides.

The careless driver turning right onto Wisconsin never sees me. These torpid zombies at the wheel, dreaming of the meat sticks they constantly shove into their faces that make them so huge and fat. Their veins and bones haven’t been seen for years under their layer of lard. They are literally made of shit.

The Concretes know how it feels to be a woman.

Rich people finally worried about social justice?  Maybe.

Volume 54, Number 10 · June 14, 2007

Review

A Hero of Our Time

By Michael Kimmelman

The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein by Martin Duberman

Knopf, 723 pp., $37.50

As the British dance critic Richard Buckle said, ‘Much as I liked [him] underneath, I began to dislike him on the surface.’ That’s at least better than the other way around. There was no moderation in Lincoln Kirstein’s reactions to others or in theirs to him. He was all hyperbole and paradox. He could be woundingly cruel and manipulative, but so transparent in his machinations that people seemed to find this quality almost endearing, as if he couldn’t help himself. He would turn against friends for no good reason and he terrified strangers. He was a glowering, ungainly giant in a dark suit with shaved head and jutting jaw–the familiar analogy was a Roman senator. But as the heir of a department store fortune his generosity as a patron was clearly boundless, like his insecurity. Nick Jenkins in The New Yorker, after Kirstein’s death in 1996, noted his contrary nature, saying Kirstein ’sought to be retiring, but he was all the more noticeable as he tried to be invisible.’ It was just as Martha Graham had said. ‘What I do not think you know,’ she told him, ‘is really how much people can and do love you, feel your warmth and your great dearness, which you try too hard to hide.’