Theory is making a game that is like the problem--
& then thinking that to win the game is to solve the
problem. Well, maybe for especially gamelike
problems...

"19.

Firecrackers sounding like shots of handguns rattle
The afternoon of early July at a late time
For celebrations and it is an inglorious
Fourth we have come to, like the birthday of a very
Sick man: no simple affirmations will do today.
In the dying wind the nation's stars and stripes slacken;
I guess this must be the flag of its disposition
Not to save itself. Only now, much later, all flags
Down for the night, we watch some bunting--no more a flag
Than the flag is our old glory--as it fitfully
Gleams in the streetlamp's conditional light, like a truth
Which the sad, difficult telling of half-conceals, half-
Discloses, through our few tears ungleaming in the dark."
--Hollander, op cit

"Quisque suos patimur Manis." --Vergil, VI.743 ('We each
undergo our own ghost [-experiences].')

" 'Knowledge deposed, then!'--groaned whom that most grieved
As foolishest of all the company..." --R Browning
[In "The Flight of the Duchess" he rhymes 'instinct' with 'quince-
tinct', 'rescue' & 'burlesque you', 'syntax' & 'tin-tacks', 'accident'
& 'flaccid dent' (1), not to mention that intriguing pair, 'turmoil'
& 'sperm oil'...& those are just the good rhymes. What
is one to make of 'inquisitive' & 'visit, I've'...?] Well! I found 8 lines
i like:
  "Oh, which were best, to roam or rest?
The land's lap or the water's breast?
To sleep on yellow millet-sheaves,
Or swim in lucid shallows just
Eluding water-lily leaves,
An inch from Death's black fingers, thrust
To lock you, whom release he must;
Which life were best on summer eves?" --from "In a Gondola"
  Philosophical question: could it be that a poet would prefer
cacophony to music, if they wrote enough?

Dreamed i was On the Bus again, part of a caravan for people
with AIDS. Most of my dream i was cleaning up one particular
bus. Before i awoke i stepped outside & saw that the caravan wasn't
moving & the bus i had been in, had no wheels.

Perceptives think Chance is on their side, Judgers think Chance is
against them. Both are wrong.

"The burden of returning is remembering he has no secrets." --John
Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (1990)

Wrote a snarling "farewell to Dallas" piece for JR. Probably won't
send it to him. But i like the beginning: "As this woeful & ensanguined
empire slouches, like a lunarscape in motion, towards a darkling appointment
with Entropy it dare not foresee, i find myself preparing to eloign."