From the big Book of Duh: BBC reports on a scientific study presented at the Society for Experimental Biology during their meeting in Salzburg, Austria that a researcher with the unlikely name of Hendrik Poorter has used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to discover the following startling truth: Plants in bigger pots grow bigger than plants …
Author Archives: mysterious6030
Toast
(On the occasion of Dad and Lynn’s wedding) May your love flow like the patient river, Channeling through life’s difficult terrain. May it bring sweetness and slow delight To make gentle the inevitable rain. May a power beyond yourselves be stirred From this merging of individual streams, And the waters of your love run cool …
Contra ApologetiX
[an old article, finally published; broken links have been noted] The Problem And no one pours the new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the Wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one …
My Confession
Thinking of the Ligurian Sea Where the romantics go to drown, Somber as the Tuscan sun sets Speaking the ineffable noun My heart a hopeless wanderer Fleeing pregnant ghosts Seeking in parti-colored silks To evade accusing hosts. The fear a promise unrealized, The events trivial and benign, Oppressed beneath the clearest skies, The punishment condign. …
Sonnet
(for Anne, on our 16th wedding anniversary) The words, you say, are easy; numbers – no. And yet your constant true addition makes Multiply our joys. Your love me takes To planes and spheres where never words can go. Though some reckon to grow their purse By calculating reasoned rates of return, If never I …
Friday Vocabulary
1. Comstockery — “censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality” (George Bernard Shaw) Though named after an anti-smut crusader of the 1870s, Comstockery has a long reach through American culture, as the example of Tipper Gore can attest. 2. poetaster — writer of inferior, insignificant verse The popular anthologies circulating in the United States …
Friday Vocabulary
1. a fortiori — all the more, for an even stronger reason Since she hired a private detective to shadow her husband, then a fortiori she would have no compunction in reading his personal email. 2. dido — bauble, trifle She wore a necklace she had made from a little dido she had found …
Friday Vocabulary
1. prosopopeia — personification (Rhetoric) The walls spoke silently of years of decaying neglect, the persistent prosopopeia of drywall and dust sounding its forlorn dirge for love’s opportunities lost. 2. apodictic — incontestable because demonstrable In spite of her constant allusions to the spiritual basis of life, she seemed always to search for apodictic rules …
Sonnet
(for Anne, on the seventeenth anniversary of our first date) This southern sun cannot eclipse the pale And dark eternal moment under moon When heaven’s vault baptized our dusty trail And future wand’rings, holy and picayune. Though breaking tides have crashed with fearsome power Against the tender union born of love, The lunar pull sustains …
Friday Vocabulary
1. sotadic — of erotic or pornographic material (after Sotades, the first known Greek erotic poet) The Victorian Age saw an avid interest in sotadic literature, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the supposedly repressed nature of the period. 2. tribadism — lesbianism The tropes of pornography have little changed since the erotic …