The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

January 20, 2005


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 08:41:59 -0500
From: Halvard Johnson <halvard@earthlink.net>
To: "Johnson, Halvard" <halvard@earthlink.net>
Subject: Poems by others:  James Wright, "A Lament for the Martyrs"


A Lament for the Martyrs

    I am sitting in an outdoor cafe across the street from the
Coliseum. The noon is so brilliant that I have to wear my dark
glasses. You would think a Roman noon could lay even the
Coliseum wide open.
    But darknesses still foul the place and its hateful grandeur.
The Roman Chamber of Commerce and Betelgueze in
combine could gut the Coliseum by day or by night till the
ghost of Mussolini and the ghost of God turned blue in the
face, and light wouldn't mean a thing in that darkness. Cities
are times of day. Once Rome was noon. Do you get me? To
take a slow lazy walk with Quintus Horatius Flaccus at four
o'clock in the night was to become light. If you don't believe
me, I offer you a method of scientific verification. I lay you
eight to five that you will go blind if you take a walk at high
noon with the President of the United States. I love my
country for it's light. I love Rome because Horace lived there.
I am afraid of the dark. I am game to live with intelligent
sinners. Sometimes these days the Romans say that whatever
the Barbarians left behind was later sacked and raped by the
Barberinis, the noble family who needed the remnant marble
for their country palaces. I find them fair enough for me.
When I was a boy, the mayors of five towns in the Ohio
River Valley solved the practical problems of prohibition by
picking the purest and most perfect bootlegger between
Pittsburgh and Cincinnati to become Chairman of the
Committee for Liquor Control. I think it would be wicked
for me to wonder what the five mayors did with their cut in
private. All I know is that within a year after Milber s public
appointment to a legal office, a symphony orchestra
mysteriously appeared in one town, two spacious football
stadiums appeared in two other towns, the madame of the
cathouse in Wheeling was appointed a dollar-a-year man by
the Federal Government, and I lost an essay-contest whose
subject was the life and work of William Dean Howells, an
American author who was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, for
Christ's sake, and whose books I had never even heard of,
much less read. (As I look back over the shadows of the years,
I confess that I have read one of his novels. I like him. He was
a good friend of Mark Twain.)
    But right now the Roman noon is so brilliant that it hurts
my eyes. ! I sip my cappuchino at a wobbly sidewalk table and
ponder the antiquities of my own childhood: the beautiful
river, that black ditch of horror; and the streetcars. Where have
they gone now, with their wicker seats that seemed to rattle
behind the dull headlights in the slow dusk, in summer where
everything in Ohio ran down and yet never quite stopped?
    Now, the Romans and the discovered Americans stroll blinded
in the Coliseum, deaf to the shadows the place never loses, even
at noon in Rome, that was for a little while one of the few noons.
    Some archaeologist gouged out the smooth dust floor of the
Coliseum to make it clean. The floor now is a careful revelation.
It is an intricate and intelligent series of ditches, and the sun
cannot reach them. They are the shadows of starved people who
did not even want to die. They were not even Jews.
    There is no way to get rid of the shadows of human beings
who could find God only in that last welcome of the creation,
the maws of tortured animals.
    Is that last best surest way to heaven the throat of the
hungry? If it is, God is very beautiful, if not very bright.
    Who are the hungry? What color is a hungry shadow?
    Even the noon sunlight in the Coliseum is the golden
shadow of a starved lion, the most beautiful of God's creatures
except maybe horses.

--James Wright

in *Unmuzzled Ox*, Vol. IV, No. 1, 1976



Hal

Halvard Johnson
===============
email: halvard@earthlink.net
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/

TURNKEY

ERRR
Errr of omission and comission dependent on the speed of execution, words
eliinated, fdged letters, the relationship between the keyboard and the
receiver - both are wireless of course, in matrimony, one to my fingers,
the other to the cpu itself - all of these - with the scanner going in the
background - crimes from brooklyn, bus frequencies, what's happening with
fire and police in my area, a continuous barrage, anyway so the letters
skip, that's what happens with wireless, ther ar packets held up or lost
forever in the system, i'm not sure which, it's clear that, brooklyn's in
a fury, the airwaves are full of it, incoming everywhere, problems with
someone named lewis, meanwhile what happens with the lost, with the
potential for tumors, with the radiation accruing here, with the wireless
lan and the wireless keyboard and wireless mouse and etc. - skull's so
thin you can never tell - consider this an error message, don'tlook for
much else, the universal 404 not found, but permanent, brooklyn world gone
down in flames, 6322 11th avenue going down, what's ahppening here, then
there are the letter reversals, the intermittencies, the duplications, the
misepllings, the huried salacious comments, the defenisve fortifications,
1083 just aking a reporrt or going to the hospital still operating on box
1512 63 year old male missing with bluejeans no coat family dispute 388
woodbine female complaint 6703

Patrol Boro Brooklyn North
     Z22   (73   /   75)             Z23 (77/79)       Z24 (81/83)
F 1 Z22   476.9875                  Z22   476.9875    Z22   476.9875
F 2 Z23   476.7375                  Z23   476.7375    Z23   476.7375
F 3 Z24   476.7875                  Z24   476.7875    Z24   476.7875
F 4 Z25   476.7625                  Z25   476.7625    Z25   476.7625
F 5 Z26   476.6875                  Z26   476.6875    Z26   476.6875
F 6 PBBN  470.9625                  PBBN  470.9625    PBBN  470.9625
F 7 Z18   476.9375  Z18   476.9375  Z20   477.0125    Z20   477.0125
F 8 Z20   477.0125  Z28   477.0875  Z21   476.4125    Z31   476.7125
F 9 TAC B 485.5875                  TAC C 485.5625    TAC D 485.4875
F10 BKIO  482.7875                  BKIO  482.7875    BKIO  482.7875
F11 CW 1  470.6875                  CW 1  470.6875    CW 1  470.6875
F12 CW 2  470.7125                  CW 2  470.7125    CW 2  470.7125

"400-1","BROOKLYN AMB DISP A","NEW YORK CITY","EMS OPERATIONS","NY","NEW
  YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S4, B1-S4, B2-S12, B3-N/A, B4-S4, B5-S4, B6-S4, B7
-S4"
"400-2","BROOKLYN SUPV DISP","NEW YORK CITY","EMS OPERATIONS","NY","NEW
YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S4, B1-S4, B2-S12, B3-N/A, B4-S4, B5-S4, B6-S4, B7-
S4"
"400-5","BROOKLYN SUPV-SUPV","NEW YORK CITY","EMS OPERATIONS","NY","NEW
YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S4, B1-S4, B2-S12, B3-N/A, B4-S4, B5-S4, B6-S4, B7-
S4"
"400-7","BROOKLYN BORO CMD","NEW YORK CITY","EMS OPERATIONS","NY","NEW Y
ORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S4, B1-S4, B2-S12, B3-N/A, B4-S4, B5-S4, B6-S4, B7-S
4"
"4816","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DEPARTMENT SYSTEM
","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-S11,B3-S11, B4-
S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"5136","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN-B7","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DEPARTMENT SYS
TEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-S11,B3-S11,
B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"5296","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN; TELL ALL-BRONX","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS D
EPARTMENT SYSTEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2
-S11,B3-S11, B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"5648","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN-B35","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DEPARTMENT SY
STEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-S11,B3-S11,
  B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"5680","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN-B44 DETOUR","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DEPART
MENT SYSTEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-S11,
B3-S11, B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"5744","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN-ULMER PK EXP BUSES","NEW YORK CITY MTA BU
S DEPARTMENT SYSTEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0,
  B2-S11,B3-S11, B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"5826","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN-Q58 DETOUR","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DEPART
MENT SYSTEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-S11,
B3-S11, B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"5936","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN-B65","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DEPARTMENT SY
STEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-S11,B3-S11,
  B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"6316","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DEPARTMENT SYSTEM
","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-S11,B3-S11, B4-
S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"9840","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN-B9, B23 DETOUR","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DE
PARTMENT SYSTEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-
S11,B3-S11, B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"33232","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN-B4 DETOUR","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DEPART
MENT SYSTEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-S11,
B3-S11, B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"33936","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN-B49","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DEPARTMENT S
YSTEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-S11,B3-S11
, B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"
"34000","BASE TO BUSES-BROOKLYN-Q58","NEW YORK CITY MTA BUS DEPARTMENT S
YSTEM","TRANSIT","NY","NEW YORK","FLEET MAP: B0-S0, B1-S0, B2-S11,B3-S11
, B4-S0, B5-S0, B6-S12"


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MWwFMeGM
http://www.asondheim.org/yung.jpg

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