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. …
Author Archives: mysterious6030
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 …
Friday Vocabulary
1. bailiwick — area of expertise or skill “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you with your cuticular problem,” said the podiatrist. “Not my bailiwick, I’m afraid.” 2. cadge — to obtain through imposition upon one’s generosity or friendship He tried to cadge another drink from his hostess in spite of his …
Little Science, Less Life
The Science of Life, by Alfred Adler (1929: Garden City, NY) I approached The Science of Life with admittedly high expectations. I have read with pleasure the writings of the other two-thirds of the psychoanalytic triumvirate of Freud, Jung, and Adler, and this was my first exposure to the works of Adler. Thus I was …
Friday Vocabulary
1. apotropaic — intended to ward off evil Before retiring in our quaint hotel room deep within vampire country, we placed crosses and apotropaic garlic before each window and upon the door. 2. gob — mouth As the wrench slammed into his left elbow his right fist was lashing out, catching the attacker smack …