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Overloading the Machine
Hotel Weather Report
No, it wasn't the same as my canyon-outlook,
But its stickiest fragment, a toe wiggle or a cough,
I pocketed. I remember
Drawing on red feathers the lost receipts
Of thrifty photographs, now adrift
In which direction? Isn't anyone
At the hole for us? We match well.
Thoughts resume their art. Autumn rakes
Are knee-deep. My son writes,
"not yet." Much interference is dialed-in
As the eavesdropper knows, but my own feeling
Is better viewed from a cliff.
Why no respite from outsider predictions,
From these dandelion idiots? This passion for blinds?
Coincidentally the hailstones, falling like crumbs,
Will always aggressively ask the window for seconds.
Not the case with my catalog picture of you
Under the mistletoe. Bundled there
Are whodunits and nibbles of cookie—
Lumpy potatoes, lumps of pillow for one head,
My years of random slurring and chemistry.
Don't run from the season premier
(However I turn is soon to be done),
Or the pebbles cavorting in your wake.
They spit on the suitable offer, the current
Beneath cordial like blankets quilted under picnics,
Wailing buckets about has-been coupons expired,
In lesser venues and crowds—so we may never get to check out
On a day like today, or yesterday.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a
creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely
a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the
bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.
Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact
that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth
to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the
very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more
afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by
an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam
as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and
put him at the head of the procession.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
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