saturday, december 3
my 24 year old transistor radio
is playing barely comprehensible reggae
("woman, go home, to your husband")
there's a fire in the stove; the kettle
on top is hissing and steams a little
in the light from outside which is
made up of silver brown dead grass
thin snow, dirty windows
and is fading as i write this
yesterday's mail brought an
envelope from elizabeth's friend ian
in new york: two chapbooks of poetry
one in particular is clear, simple,
and belongs in some tradition perfectly
expressible in english but somehow
often obscured
with sources i imagine
in rumi or the desert fathers
ian's blurb says he's a political anarchist
incidentally i checked out some books last weekend,
in an effort to get more of a handle
on what that kind of thing means
one of them was god and the state
so far i've mostly figured out
that bakunin wasn't very big on
either one of them.
it also says he's a practicing
maronite catholic, which i'll just
admit i didn't know the first thing about
until i looked it up
the desert fathers might not be
too far off the mark.