Wizard Locks

12/8/15
Two years ago, but still relevant.
A favorite profile pic.
I look my age, and that's not always easy to accept.

You'll find out, my young friends.
MD

What Archilochos Said

"Greet insolence with outrage."
----------Archilochos,
one of those--his--fragments in Guy Davenport's translation from the Classical Greek.

What Archilochos Said:
four words that have worked well in class, provoking good discussions of diction, denotation, connotation, and character study.

So much in four words.  Just think of what's said, what's signaled, with that choice of "greet" instead of "meet" or "match" or "return".

I must admit I have a qualm or two about the violence in the lines, but then we--our spirits, the collective consciousness--do need rousing in these times.

From "The Monkey's Raincoat"

"'Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and someday you will be a real boy.' The Blue Fairy said that.  In Pinnochio."

--Elvis Cole's line on page 58
of Robert Crais' first novel The Monkey's Raincoat.


(Keith would have gotten the point of the quotation from a crime novel, would have asked at least three good questions, and then would have debated our respective positions for as long as we felt like it.  That's a good friend.)

Sinead Morrissey: "& Forgive Us Our Trespasses"

& FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES  

Of which the first is love. The sad, unrepeatable fact
that the loves we shouldn’t foster burrow faster and linger longer
than sanctioned kinds can. Loves that thrive on absence, on lack
of return, or worse, on harm, are unkillable, Father.
They do not die in us. And you know how we’ve tried.
Loves nursed, inexplicably, on thoughts of sex,
a return to touched places, a backwards glance, a sigh -
they come back like the tide. They are with us at the terminus
when cancer catches us. They have never been away.
Forgive us the people we love – their dragnet influence.
Those disallowed to us, those who frighten us, those who stay
on uninvited in our lives and every night revisit us.
Accept from us the inappropriate
by which our dreams and daily scenes stay separate.   

--Sinead Morrissey

Mirror

"I have a jumbled mind that only achieves clarification at times and then under pressure, as in a classroom. Then the material provides the unity; the random insights."

--Theodore Roethke

Teague's "Explanation To A Student"

EXPLANATION TO A STUDENT

Even in Shakespeare, some words mean

what they seem; here water is its ordinary self, dripping

no irony, sloshing waves up the shore,

and when Roderigo wants to drown himself

from sorrow, he means, quite literally drown.

If you do not see a circle floating above the line,

a buoy marking deeper meanings,

notes submerged by ripples of thous and 'zounds,

you may lie on the raft of the surface--

as Roderigo might have, unrequited but still too light

for drowning, or as you would be carried 

from your chair if a friend said, I'd love

some water.  You'd fill her glass with liquid,

tasteless and transparent, not wondering

if she wanted something metaphoric (the boiling point,

viscosity, and surface tension unusually high

for its molecular weight), like tragedy, or love.

When the time comes to navigate 

the shoals inside soliloquies, you'll have to trust

not all words will deceive you.  Not all are false

as water, which you'll remember

Othello calls the dead Desdemona, to explain

why he has killed her, why he would not listen

to her vow she had always been true.

--Alexandra Teague,

from her recent award-winning volume

Mortal Geography.