75

So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found;
Now proud as an enjoyer and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure,
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure;
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight
And by and by clean starved for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight,
Save what is had or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.

-- W.S. on letters.

Villanelle

Every day our bodies separate,
exploded torn and dazed.
Not understanding what we celebrate

we grope through languages and hesitate
and touch each other, speechless and amazed;
and every day our bodies separate

us further from our planned, deliberate
ironic lives. I am afraid, disphased,
not understanding what we celebrate

when our fused limbs and lips communicate
the unlettered power we have raised.
Every day our bodies' separate

routines are harder to perpetuate.
In wordless darkness we learn wordless praise,
not understanding what we celebrate;

wake to ourselves, exhausted, in the late
morning as the wind tears off the haze
not understanding how we celebrate
our bodies. Every day we separate.

-- Marilyn Hacker

I've become such a vague ephemeral undeciding being who curses the gods in his bed sleep and wanders around bareheaded and stupid in the gray darkness...
-- Jack Kerouac (from Desolation Angels)

...it all does flow and you never know where on the river's shore the tides of honkeytonk seraphim and shot glass will puke you up.
-- Nick Tosches

the nerd is a small humaniod creature

nerd - also nurd n. Slang
1. A foolish, inept, or unattractive person.
2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.

nerdy - adj.
Word History: The word nerd, undefined but illustrated, first appeared in 1950 in Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo: “And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!” (The nerd is a small humanoid creature looking comically angry, like a thin, cross Chester A. Arthur.) Nerd next appears, with a gloss, in the February 10, 1957, issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail in a regular column entitled “ABC for SQUARES”: “Nerda square, any explanation needed?” Many of the terms defined in this “ABC” are unmistakable Americanisms, such as hep, ick, and jazzy, as is the gloss “square,” the current meaning of nerd. The third appearance of nerd in print is back in the United States in 1970 in Current Slang: “Nurd [sic], someone with objectionable habits or traits.... An uninteresting person, a ‘dud.’” Authorities disagree on whether the two nerds Dr. Seuss's small creature and the teenage slang term in the Glasgow Sunday Mailare the same word. Some experts claim there is no semantic connection and the identity of the words is fortuitous. Others maintain that Dr. Seuss is the true originator of nerd and that the word nerd (“comically unpleasant creature”) was picked up by the five- and six-year-olds of 1950 and passed on to their older siblings, who by 1957, as teenagers, had restricted and specified the meaning to the most comically obnoxious creature of their own class, a “square.”

Evolution
      Lambertsbaii, South Africa, 1992


A girl scoops up a barnacle still sealed, sleek as a liver, glossy-black.
Her fingers trace its ear-like curve, wrench it open.

Down the beach, shell-pink children wade through tidepools, lift
      long flamingo legs
over kinked ropes of seaplants shining

with tide-froth, over unhinged barnacles, deep
bruises on the sand. She drops the shell-winged body

foaming to the beach benchmarked by the tide's endless
starting over, erasing

the margin of regret. Yesterday I saw nothing

but fog, the last
wintery breath of every creature on earth or all the dead

risen, clouding the blue mirror held
over the pale lip of sand. Or the barrier

of my own breath, that pearl wall. She drifts
until the cloud of her body

dissolves into sand. Until we are not
this skin, not flesh tangled with fishing-line nerves, feathery

weeds of blood, but petrified foam drifting the tongue of rock
alive with birds, pale cape gannets, dark cormorants,

penguins taking the first wobbling human steps to shore.


-- Sandra Meek