Our own J. E. H. Smith, in his eponymous weblog:

Why do I feel so much more at home in Finland than in France, in spite of having spent a good part of my adult life trying to fit in in the latter republic, jetting back and forth to Charles de Gaulle, learning to gossip about Sarkozy as if I cared, nodding knowingly when some third party, some briefcase-toting little man in a fine-tailored suit, is marked out as a normalien? I come back to Helsinki after 19 years, for only the second time in my life, the language is just as impenetrable as ever, and yet I experience the whole thing as fitting and easy, while every visit to Paris is experienced as nothing more than a resistance test.

What is it, exactly? There is a general feeling of at-homeness that I have not just in Finland, but in a certain swath of the world that extends mostly across the northern zones of the continents of the North Atlantic. I only very gradually came to realize that this swath is co-extensive with that small bit of the earth's surface which, 400-some years ago, was swept up in the spirit of Reformation. Now I would like to think that this is a distinction that does not matter. I spent a good part of my life in complete ignorance of it, and even have a distinct memory of being 13 and still being confused as to which of the pair of terms, 'Protestant' and 'prostitute', means what. But now it seems clear and undeniable to me that there is a deep cultural divide that, while it might not in fact trace its causes back to the wars of religion, somehow sits on the map in the same way as those wars' eventual boundaries.

If I can put this in a different way, and in a way that will at first sound like a change of subject: I think it's safe to say that one would be hard pressed to locate a single French academic in his thirties who could correctly identify a song by Motörhead. In my recent unscientific survey of a comparison class of Finnish philosophers, by contrast, I discovered that five out of five displayed a high level of Motörhead-recognition ability, could make fine-grained distinctions between black metal, death metal, Viking metal and other sub-sub-genres of metal, and, while not ignorant of baroque chamber music, certainly would not see familiarity with it as the key to upward mobility towards the cultural elite. What, one wonders, would Distinction have looked like if Bourdieu had been a Finn?

More here.

“AP Photographer Charlie Riedel just filed the following images of seabirds caught in the oil slick on a beach on Louisiana's East Grand Terre Island. As BP engineers continue their efforts to cap the underwater flow of oil, landfall is becoming more frequent, and the effects more evident.”

More from the Boston Globe here. [Thanks to Carl Zimmer.]

There was another condemned man standing beside Li Minchu on the platform. The other condemned prisoner, who was said to be a former navy captain and as strong as a horse, had been caught while swimming toward the other side of the lake wearing a pair of shackles. He struggled now, and let out a cry, for which he got a mouthful of sand. His face turned purplish. He was shaking madly. By comparison, Li Minchu looked as calm as if he had no idea why he should be standing there on the platform facing his fellow inmates’ frightened stares. Because of his calmness, they didn’t stuff anything into his mouth. But I found Li Minchu had changed into another man, as if he no longer cared about his fate. In my memory, he was timid. When someone threatened to report on his wife’s bringing in a piece of cake inside a hollowed bar of soap, he gave half of it to his cellmates in exchange for keeping the secret; when we were seated on the platform at the detention house to be sentenced he was the only one who cried. But now he was as calm as a man waiting for an award. He kept standing straight even after the other condemned man collapsed on the platform and wet his pants.

more from Xiaoda Xiao at Guernica here.

The ability to port data in and out of consciousness has been demonstrated in multiple capacities with multiple interfaces ranging from low-fidelity non-invasive to high-fidelity radically invasive. Although these technologies seem like science fiction, they are being vigorously explored by academic, medical, and commercial interests, with companies like BrainGate seeking patents on multiple neural interfaces and software platforms simultaneously. While the primary purpose of neural interface research is putatively therapeutic, the functional potentials and ethical concerns of neural porting are problems looming in the future. Right now these are hypothetical concerns, but if a single-access embedded neurode procedure could be perfected and automated and performed at a local clinic in two hours for around a thousand dollars, and it was covered by insurance, the temptation for cosmetic and personal use of such a procedure becomes clear. Neural interfaces can be abused, obviously, and can be hacked into to enslave and torture minds, or drive people intentionally insane, or turn them into sleeper assassins or mindless consumers. Security is an inherent problem of any extensible exo-cortical system that must be addressed early in the engineering and testing stages, or anyone with an exo-cortical input would be ripe for exploitation. Sensory discrimination is an ongoing problem in any media environment, so individual channel selection, manual override, and the ability to shut down device input should be an integral part of any embedded system.

more from James Kent at h+ Magazine here.

The world we inhabit is one in which weekly newsmagazines, printed on paper in columns of type, are considered primitive and profoundly obsolescent; in which an entire bookshelf of bound volumes can be stored in a gadget the size of a fingertip; in which a mechanical device that is only about four inches long and a fraction of an inch thick can record whatever we like, play it back to us through a tiny earpiece, and rest comfortably in a pocket when not in use; in which space flight has been invented but is rarely used by humans, who have lost interest in it after the initial decades of excitement; in which hand-held or easily portable computers are a commonplace item; in which literature can hardly be distinguished from film in the public mind; and in which some members of society long fruitlessly for a past era when all such developments were unknown and almost inconceivable. We do, in fact, live in such a world, but I mean something else. The above description, detail by detail, exactly characterizes the world of Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity, a science-fiction novel set mainly in the 482nd, 575th, and 2456th centuries. What is remarkable is that Asimov’s book first appeared in print in 1955. For those of you who were not around then (and I barely was—I was three at the time), let me assure you that none of the present-day realities mentioned in my first paragraph was even a mote in a scientist’s eye.

more from Wendy Lesser at Threepenny Review here.

The Fortnightly Review is providing a translation of the segment from Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé's Le roman russe (1886) in 6 parts. From part 1:

HERE COMES THE SCYTHIAN, the true Scythian, who is going to revolutionize all our intellectual habits! We accompany him into the very heart of Moscow, into that monstrous cathedral of Saint Basil, shaped and painted like a Chinese pagoda, built by Tartar architects and yet harboring the Christian’s God!

Turgeneff [Turgenev] and Dostoyevsky, though at school together and embarking together in the same intellectual movement, and though making their début the same year, yet stand in violent contrast to each other. The one thing they had in common was human sympathy, that distinctive mark of the men of “The ‘Forties.” In Dostoyevsky this feeling became exalted into a despairing compassion for the poor, and this made him the special teacher of this class which believed in him.

Invisible bonds exist between all forms of art born in the same hour. The desire which led all these Russian writers the study the realities of life s, and the influences which, at the same moment, induced the great landscape painters of France to study nature, seem to have sprung from the same source. Corot, Rousseau, Millet, illustrate a common tendency, combined with the personal differences which existed in and characterized their respective talents. The preference given to either of these painters will indicate the preference to be given to either of those writers. I do not wish to force the comparison, but it is yet the only means for rapidly putting one’s mind at ease in regard to the unknown.

Corot stands for Turgeneff’s grace and poesy; Rousseau for Tolstoy’s simple grandeur, and Millet for Dostoyevsky’s tragic bitterness.

His novels are now translated in France, but what astonishes me is that they are read everywhere with pleasure. It puts me at ease when writing about them.

I should not have believed it if I had tried to describe this strange figure before the resemblance could have been verified by the reading of his novels. But these would be difficult to understand unless one knew the life of the writer who created them – I was going to say experienced them. Never mind – the former word indicates the latter.

Part 2 here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

I have to agree with Jerry Coyne here: the program on Faith and Science at this year’s World Science Festival is a mistake. I went to last year’s Festival, and I have great respect for Brian Greene and Tracy Day for bringing together such a massive undertaking. It would be better if they didn’t take money from the Templeton Foundation, but money has to come from somewhere, and I’m not the one paying the bills. I don’t even mind having a panel that talks about religion — it’s a big part of many people’s lives, and there are plenty of issues to be discussed at the intersection of science and religion.

But it would be a lot more intellectually respectable to present a balanced discussion of those issues, rather than the one that is actually lined up. The panelists include two scientists who are Templeton Prize winners — Francisco Ayala and Paul Davies — as well as two scholars of religion — Elaine Pagels and Thupten Jinpa. Nothing in principle wrong with any of those people, but there is a somewhat obvious omission of a certain viewpoint: those of us who think that science and religion are not compatible. And there are a lot of us! Also, we’re right. A panel like this does a true disservice to people who are curious about these questions and could benefit from a rigorous airing of the issues, rather than a whitewash where everyone mumbles pleasantly about how we should all just get along.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Carlos Ruiz Zafón was born in Barcelona and is the author of The Shadow of the Wind, the most successful novel in Spanish publishing history after Don Quixote. Translated into more than 35 languages, it has been read by over 12m readers worldwide. The Prince of Mist, a children's book and the first work Ruiz Zafón published, is now available in English for the first time.

Mention the gothic and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century – in literature, film and beyond. Ours is a time with a dark heart, ripe for the noir, the gothic and the baroque. A basic list of great 20th-century gothic novels could include at least 100 but, since space is limited, here are a few places to begin your explorations. As always, try to get out of your comfort zone and ignore conventional wisdom on what is good or bad. 'Free your mind, and the rest will follow …'”

1. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

One of the very best ghost stories ever written. Shirley Jackson's writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature. Take this as a first step and discover one of the most unusual and underrated writers of the last century.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Hitch-22” traces Mr. Hitchens’s coming of age as a public intellectual and as a man, and charts the long and serrated arc of his thinking about politics, from his early days as a militant member of the International Socialists to his gradual drift toward positions, like his support for the Iraq War, that have made some on the left scratch their heads. Anyone who’s closely read Mr. Hitchens’s work — including his best-selling manifesto “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (2007) — or seen him do battle on cable news programs, knows that he has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent’s arguments with a flick of the wrist. He holds dear the serious things, the things that matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the mind, loyalty, holding public figures to high standards.

His mental Swiss Army knife also contains, happily, a corkscrew. Mr. Hitchens is devoted to wit and bawdy wordplay and to good Scotch and cigarettes (though he has recently quit smoking) and long nights spent talking. He is also devoted to friendship. “Hitch-22” is among the loveliest paeans to the dearness of one’s friends — Mr. Hitchens’s close ones include Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and the poet James Fenton — I’ve ever read. The business and pleasure sides of Mr. Hitchens’s personality can make him seem, whether you agree with him or not, among the most purely alive people on the planet. “Hitch-22” does a sleek, funny job of rolling out his life story. He was born in 1949 in Portsmouth, into a less-than-bookish family: his father was a career navy man. Mr. Hitchens was precocious. According to family legend, his first complete sentence was “Let’s all go and have a drink at the club.”

More here.

Bradley Burston in Haaretz:

In going to war in Gaza in late 2008, Israeli military and political leaders hoped to teach Hamas a lesson. They succeeded. Hamas learned that the best way to fight Israel is to let Israel do what it has begun to do naturally: bluster, blunder, stonewall, and fume.

Hamas, and no less, Iran and Hezbollah, learned early on that Israel's own embargo against Hamas-ruled Gaza was the most sophisticated and powerful weapon they could have deployed against the Jewish state.

Here in Israel, we have still yet to learn the lesson: We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel's Vietnam.

More here.

Richard Florida in The Atlantic:

…the standard way economists measure human capital is to take the percentage of people in a country, state, or metropolitan area with a bachelor's degree or higher.

So I was intrigued by this fascinating analysis by Rob Pitingolo (h/t: Don Peck) which looks at the density of human capital. Pitingolo put together a neat measure that he refers to as “educational attainment density.” Instead of measuring human capital or college degree holders as a function of population, he measures it as a function of land area — that is, as college degree holders per square mile. As he explains:

I compiled the data at two geographic levels: first at the city level and second at the “urban county” level. I realize that comparing these geographies is not always entirely fair. That's why I'm giving away the spreadsheet with all of my work to anyone who wants to build upon this analysis (download it here). I picked these cities by looking at the 50 largest metro areas by population and pulling what I deemed to be the “primary city” from each. In two metro areas, the Twin Cities and Bay Area, I pulled two “primary cities.”

He goes through a variety of analyses — all of which I highly recommend. But let me just show the results of his analysis of college degree density for the 50 largest cities.

More here.

Until she was in her 50s, Louise Bourgeois, who has died aged 98 after a heart attack, was known to the New York glitterati merely as the charming French lady who appeared at private views on the arm of her American husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater. There had been a few decently received shows of Bourgeois’s own work in the 1940s and early 50s, but then the abstract expressionists swept the decks clean. Nothing could withstand the sheer artistic elan and commercial drive of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, and the backing of Clement Greenberg, a critic whose thumbs up or down meant life or death. It was not until the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) gave Bourgeois a retrospective in 1982, when she was already 70, that she at last took her place as queen of New York, one of the most inventive and disturbing sculptors of the century and, later, the first artist to to tackle a commission for a temporary work to command the vast spaces of the turbine hall of the new Tate Modern, in London.

more from Michael McNay at The Guardian here.

About halfway through the Putin presidency, a funny thing started happening to Russian novelists: They all started writing dystopias. In 2006, Vladimir Sorokin, the legendary deconstructionist novelist, published a traditional dystopian satire about the secret services, A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik; that same year, the literary novelist Olga Slavnikova won the Russian Booker with 2017, and the prodigiously prolific and overweight man of letters Dmitry Bykov published ZhD, set in a future where Russia is at war with a Western force called the ZhDs, who are winning because of their discovery of “phlogiston,” a remarkable substance that has replaced oil as the West’s fuel of choice and rendered Russia nearly obsolete. This strange literary outburst was related, I think, to the political stagnation of the Putin years. That he was bringing back authoritarianism in some form no one doubted; but in just what form, and how brutally, how totally, it was hard to tell. The present seemed to make no impression. A novelist who described this present would at some level simply be wrong. As far as the eye could see, nothing was happening. In order to create a meaning, in order to make sense of this present, you had to project current tendencies some years into the future. Looking at American fiction of the same time, you see something like the exact opposite phenomenon.

more from Keith Gessen at Bookforum here.

Since James Joyce’s Ulysses made rewriting the Odyssey the foundational gesture of modernism, there have been innumerable rather trivial contemporary engagements with Homer, which, even when they are as engaging as Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, have rarely been more than a one-trick pony. Derek Walcott’s Omeros, in verse, is the outstanding exception. The thought of yet another slim, self-conscious volume of modernist prose, this time a first novel by a Californian computer scientist, whose PhD was on a “computational corpus-based metaphor extraction system”, does not sound promising – although the idea of a system to extract metaphors from texts might be a good modernist joke: a terrifying totalitarian world where metaphor-cleansing was an industrialized process. The Lost Books of the Odyssey certainly proclaims its modernist status. It has forty-four very short chapters – the longest is only nine generously laid out pages, the shortest a bare single page – each of which is a fragmentary narrative, a calque on the Odyssey.

more from Simon Goldhill at the TLS here.

Sean Patrick Cooper in The Millions:

While the methods by which we now acquire our music have had an impact, to a degree, on our experience of music listening, they have remained markedly less influential than the evolutions in the design and application of what we use to listen to our music. In 2008 and 2009, close to 100 million iPods were purchased globally. The widespread use of personal mp3 players and, more importantly, the headphones attached to those players, have gone on to facilitate for a significant percentage of the population a kind of relationship that has never before occurred between music listener and music.

Join the public space and look around: It takes only a brief moment to locate an individual plugged in and headphoned up. Like using an umbrella, headphones serve a particular function, shielding us from the nuisances of the world. Hop on any form of public transportation, plug in, and no longer must you suffer the coughing, sneezing, dry throat clearing, cell phone texting, loud speaker announcing, sneaker squeaking, nervous leg tapping, neighbor yawning, Doritos eating, water bottle dropping and newspaper shuffling that is the shuttle, train, or bus around you. Step off and into the street and headphones continue to serve you well. Why subject yourself to the car honking, police whistle blowing and sidewalk chattering of the urban space when you don’t have to?

More here.

In the NYT:

Mr. Voznesensky and poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvensky burst onto the stage in the cultural thaw that followed Stalin’s death in 1953 and rose to stardom in the 1960s, filling stadiums for poetry readings and attracting worldwide attention as creators of powerful verse and symbols of youthful defiance.

Mr. Voznesensky traveled the world to read his poetry, serving as a sort of unofficial Kremlin cultural envoy, even though he was a critic of rough-handed Soviet policies like the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He seemed to provide a propaganda boost at times to Moscow in its yearning search for approval at home and abroad. His independent voice seemed to represent the Communist leadership’s degree of tolerance for criticism, encouraging some foes of totalitarianism to believe that the system could be reformed.

Whatever Mr. Voznesensky’s political opinions, his skill, experimentation and depth as a poet won respect around the world. He was also remembered as a magnificent reader of his poetry. He once appeared in London on the same bill as Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield and more than held his own.

“I Am Goya,” one of Mr. Voznesensky’s earliest and best-known poems, expressed the fear of war he experienced in childhood. It was inspired by a volume of Goya’s etchings given to him by his father and reads in part (as translated by the American poet Stanley Kunitz):

I am Goya
of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged
till the craters of my eyes gape
I am grief
I am the tongue
of war, the embers of cities
on the snows of the year 1941
I am hunger
I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya

The poem creates its impressions of war and horror through a series of images and interrelated variations on the name of the painter, which echo throughout in a series of striking sound metaphors, in Russian: Goya, glaz (eyes), gore (grief), golos (voice), gorod (cities), golod (hunger), gorlo (gullet).

Andrew F. March and Paul Berman debate Berman in Dissent. March:

PAUL BERMAN has written an odd book. It is not intellectual history–he rightly does not claim for himself any expertise in Islamic legal, theological and political thought, and he makes no effort to fully explicate Ramadan’s own doctrines in light of those traditions. It is not political biography–he is not telling Ramadan’s personal story except in select snippets. It is not quite political argument–he is not giving an analysis of the social and cultural situation of Muslims in the West and telling us What is to Be Done. It is not even a plea for vigilance–he insists in numerous places that Ramadan is not an Islamist extremist and certainly no threat to anyone.

What is Berman’s book about, in the end? It is an attempt to arrive at a judgment about a very important public intellectual while admonishing educated Westerners about how we treat Muslim dissidents. In doing so, the book discusses Ramadan’s thought and the wider phenomenon of Islamic militancy, but it takes a skipping-stone approach to the subject: glancing off many various surfaces and edges rather than patiently probing the depths. Berman is aiming at a profile-cum-exposé of Ramadan, but he is entangled in an awkward set of questions which he thinks need to be raised about Muslim intellectuals: Should we trust him? Should we like him? Should we praise him? Should we support him? Berman never explicitly discusses what kind of judgment we need to make about a figure like Ramadan, but my feeling (a standard Berman uses often in his own appraisal of Ramadan) is that Berman wishes he could prove to us that we shouldn’t trust him and that we are permitted to condemn him, but since he can’t prove that, he has to settle with showing us that we should not like him.

Berman responds:

MY SKEPTICAL eye alights upon Andrew F. March’s fourth paragraph, where he explains that, in The Flight of the Intellectuals, I spend 100 pages recounting “the often stomach-churning history of Arab and Islamic attitudes towards Israel, Jews, Hitler, and the Holocaust.” He suggests that I have slandered Ramadan by family association with the stomach-churning history. But March devotes not one sentence to describing or summarizing what is said in those hundred pages.

Tariq Ramadan’s grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood was the original expression of the political movement known as Islamism, which, in its different versions, has gone into bloom in many parts of the world. In the hundred pages that Andrew F. March abstains from discussing, I explain that Tariq Ramadan has written a book largely devoted to Hassan al-Banna, called Aux Sources du Renouveau Musulman, which I translate as The Roots of the Muslim Renewal. The book emphasizes that Ramadan is, in fact, al-Banna’s grandson—a fact that is announced in the book’s opening dedicatory words: “To my mother, the eldest daughter of Hassan al-Banna.” But what chiefly matters is of course Ramadan’s intellectual filiation from al-Banna and his place within al-Banna’s current of fundamentalist theological interpretation, which is called “salafi reformism.” I judge The Roots of the Muslim Renewal to be Ramadan’s finest book, from a strictly literary standpoint. It expresses Ramadan’s philosophical ideas and heritage more clearly than any of his other books. I also judge the book to be gravely and even deliberately misleading about his grandfather.

Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker on Ayaan Hirsi, Tariq Ramadan, and Paul Berman:

Berman deftly summarizes a revisionist history that emphasizes “centuries of Muslim cruelty toward the Jews,” challenging the conventional view that European-style anti-Semitism was unknown under the Ottoman Empire. But he misses an opportunity to enrich his genealogy of hate by setting it within the modern history of the Middle East and Asia. For instance, he makes a passing reference to Rashid Rida, a prominent Islamist thinker at the turn of the twentieth century and al-Banna’s revered teacher, expressing curiosity about his praise for early Zionist settlers, but doesn’t explore the matter further. Although, ultimately, Rida turned against Zionism as Jewish immigration to Palestine surged in the wake of the Balfour Declaration, he had been an outspoken critic of European anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus trial and made early attempts, including an exchange with Chaim Weizmann, regarding an agreement between “the Arabs and their Hebrew cousins.” Berman rightly points out that the mufti of Jerusalem showed an obscene eagerness to help extend the Final Solution to the Middle East, and hatred of British colonialists and Zionist settlers certainly provoked Naziphilia among many Arabs of the nineteen-thirties and forties. But it is worth noting that, by 1941, when the mufti sidled up to Hitler and, soon afterward, began to air his anti-Semitic rants on the radio, reactionary pan-Islamists like him had to contend with overlapping groups of liberal Westernizers, Marxists, and secular Arab nationalists; far from being representative of the larger Arab world, the mufti was a fast-diminishing figure even in his own small sphere of influence—forced out of Palestine by the British in 1937 and blamed for a series of political debacles there. Berman himself relates that Arabs comprehensively failed to respond to the mufti’s exhortations to kill the Jews.

What you wouldn’t guess from Berman’s account is how common it was for anti-colonialist leaders to stumble into such unlikely alliances. In the nineteen-twenties, Mahatma Gandhi, a devout Hindu and pacifist, vigorously campaigned for the restoration of the caliphate. And in 1941 an old colleague of his, Subhas Chandra Bose, travelled to Berlin and enlisted Indian P.O.W.s who later fought in the Waffen S.S. The expedient notion that my enemy’s enemy is my friend even motivated the Jewish militant leader Avraham Stern to try, in 1940, to enlist Nazi support against the British rulers of Palestine. Bose, who went on to collaborate with Japanese militarists against the British in the Japanese invasion of India, remains a great nationalist icon, while Winston Churchill, the resolute anti-Fascist so admired in the West, is reviled as a crudely racist imperialist who delayed Indian independence as long as he could and inflicted death on millions with his callous policies during the Great Famine of Bengal, in 1943. These Janus reputations should remind us that what Berman casts as an epic moral struggle between liberalism and Fascism in the West has been experienced and remembered very differently in the East.

…In light of these alternative histories, “The Flight of the Intellectuals” seems to be laboring merely to underline the obvious: that a Muslim with a political subjectivity shaped by decades of imperial conquest, humiliation, and postcolonial failure does not share the world view of a liberal from Brooklyn. Yet there has long been such a chasm between Western intellectuals and their counterparts in formerly subordinate countries, an incompatibility of historical memories. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the war on terror have hardened prejudice and suspicion on all sides; now more than ever it is necessary for Western intellectuals to find real interlocutors among Muslim thinkers and activists. Tariq Ramadan may not be ideal, but the impulse to engage with him seems to exemplify the best kind of liberalism—unself-righteous and aware of its own inadequacies.

My Father's Loveletters

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
Close his eyes, & ask me to write
The same letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than a man. He'd beg her
Return & promised to never
Beat her again. I was almost happy
She was gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in something bad.
His carpenter's apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Holstered in a loop at his side
& extension cords coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under
The pressure of my ballpoint:
Love, Baby, Honey, Please.
We lingered in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . . the heartless
Gleam of a two pound wedge
On the concrete floor,
A sunset in the doorway
Of the tool shed.
I wondered if she'd laugh
As she held them over a flame.
My father could only sign
His name, but he'd look at blueprints
& tell you how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, stood there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word,
Opened like a fresh wound, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

by Yusef Komunyakaa
from New American Poets of the '90s
David R. Godine, Publisher, 1991