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Jen Besemer: "The Sea of No Future"
2007-11-11 17:38:00
Writers of "transgressive" fiction now have an outlet at Ignavia, a new online journal seeking submissions of stories that are "dark, edgy and queer." (Maximum 4,000 words; submit by email only.) I found Jen Besemer's story from the first issue especially compelling. An excerpt: My mother is the sound of derisive laughter, my father is a gunshot. I am the crust of bread left on the table after the guests are gone, or perhaps?sometimes?I am the lost bicycle of autumn found at the bottom of spring?s ravine. In either case I am, how do you say it, flotsam or jetsam. That which is thrown overboard, that which is overbalanced, topheavy, that which is fallen.No. And again, no. I reject this present tense because I am no longer a shipwreck nor a wreck of any kind. No bruises darken my jaw, no scars slender as night glove my wrists or decorate my throat, and my long strand of bright freshwater pills has been buried for months. Oh, loss. That I could have pined for even these things, imagin...
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A Royal Priesthood
2007-11-10 18:41:00
Today is the feast day of Pope Leo the Great, bishop of Rome from 440 to 461 AD, whose writings played a significant role in clarifying the doctrine of the Incarnation. James Kiefer at The Daily Office shares this encouraging passage from one of his sermons: Although the universal Church of God is constituted of distinct orders of members, still, in spite of the many parts of its holy body, the Church subsists as an integral whole, just as the Apostle says: we are all one in Christ. . .For all, regenerated in Christ, are made kings by the sign of the cross; they are consecrated priests by the oil of the Holy Spirit, so that beyond the special service of our ministry as priests, all spiritual and mature Christians know that they are a royal race and are sharers in the office of the priesthood. For what is more king-like that to find yourself ruler over your body after having surrendered your soul to God? And what is more priestly than to promise the Lord a pure conscience and to...
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Makoto Fujimura on Jesus and Monsters
2007-11-09 16:28:00
Acclaimed visual artist Makoto Fujimura shares some profound insights about resisting the cultural imperative to choose between religious faith and the unfettered artistic imagination, in this article from Implications, the online journal of the Trinity Forum. Highlights: If you are an artist, you know you are seen as out of the mainstream, as avant-garde, but you also have been treated like a misfit or patronized like a child. You struggle to find meaning and significance in that gap between the two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. ?Grow up and do something useful for society!? The world seems to place them in opposition, pitting Innocence against the reality of the Experience. Artists are caught between being able to have that curiosity, inquisitiveness, and emboldened sense of discovery of a child and the reality of the ?adult world,? a reality that forces us to realize that we all indeed live in fear, in a ground zero of some kind or another. In our conversation t...
More About: Jesus , Monsters , Mons

Getting Unstuck
2007-11-07 16:51:00
Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative hosts an online forum for contributors to weigh in on the question of the month. October's topic was the ever-timely (or ever-untimely, depending on how you look at it) problem of writer's block: How Do You Get Unstuck?  Some words of wisdom I found especially useful: Arlene L. Mandell: "Here?s a radical idea: Perhaps it?s all right to be stuck sometimes, not to be a busy little writing bee frantic for that next fuzzy morsel of pollen. Badly mixed metaphors like this one often come from the need to put something, anything, on the page."Harriet Gleeson: "The problem was possibly triggered when a respected mentor suggested that I could aim at a (first) chapbook using the theme Flight, the metaphor which has been winging its way into my work recently with no particular effort. The thought of publication was maybe too exciting -- I started to WORK towards the chapbook perhaps -- WORK the metaphor into my current piece, when what I need...

Recent Publications: Juked, Fulcrum and Others
2007-11-06 19:21:00
A roundup of my recent publications news: I just learned that I won an honorable mention in the 2007 Juked Fiction and Poetry Prize for my poems "Confession" and "The Opposite of Pittsburgh". (Partial credit for the latter poem goes to "Ada Porter", the character in my novel who actually wrote it. I just do whatever the voices in my head tell me.) In other news, my poem "Zeal" was accepted for the 2008 issue of FULCRUM: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, an exciting journal edited by my old Harvard classmate Philip Nikolayev and his wife Katia Kapovich. (But as George W. Bush said when he went to Yale, I got in solely based on merit.) Philip's latest book is Letters from Aldenderry. Another poem, "Delivered", will appear in the prose-poem issue of Poemeleon next month. I'll link to it here when the issue comes out. Finally, the University of Texas School of Law has made available online some poems I had published in the 2004 collection Off the Record...
More About: Site News , Poems , Publications , Recent

"Once Again" by "Conway"
2007-11-05 12:14:00
  "Conway", my pseudonymous correspondent at a maximum-security prison in central California, has gone another round in our poetry war with "Once Again", a response to my poem "A Difference of Opinion", which was itself inspired by Stephen Dobyns' "Artistic Matters" from his 1996 book Common Carnage. And the beat goes on...A Difference of Opinionby Jendi Reiter (1996)Once there was only the mudand one-celled things with just enough     purpo seinternal to themselves to be alive,but too soft to fossilize, leaving no traceof themselves in history except the evolved     patt ernfor whose sake billions of them were flung away     by naturelike soldiers or confetti.Finally the moment camewhen they began to prey upon one another,cell against cell, and only thendid nature sit back in satisfactionto watch the sharp beauty of spikes grow,the monumental callousness of armor,the cunning of hooks, all the h...

Book Notes: Couldn't Keep It to Myself
2007-11-05 10:44:00
Bestselling author Wally Lamb led me to some crucial insights about self-acceptance, forgiveness and gratitude with his novels She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True. Now, in his role as writing workshop leader at a women's prison, he's empowered some forgotten and outcast members of our society to understand how they became who they are, and to make the rest of us recognize our common humanity. Couldn't Keep It to Myself is the first collection of autobiographical essays by Lamb's students at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. The sequel, I'll Fly Away, was just released.Emotionally, this book is a hard read because of the numbing similarity of their traumatic pasts. The women's voices, however, are fresh and individual, even humorous at times. Childhood sexual abuse is virtually universal, and the pattern is often repeated in their adult relationships. Several of the authors finally struck back against men who were abusi...
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Secular Film and the Sublime
2007-11-03 11:49:00
Two films I saw this week have something to teach Christian artists about communicating the sublime. Neither was particularly deep, though one had pretensions in that direction. Both were about 40 minutes too long, the lack of character development eventually making me lose interest in pure visual sensation, but what a sensation it was. Most relationship-driven movies I've seen are directed like large-screen television shows, while the action movies are like video games, with lots of "shock and awe" but little attention to beauty. Across the Universe, the Beatles musical directed by Julie Taymor, is one of the few that sensually savors the visual medium and delights in exploring its extreme capabilities. So much so, in fact, that I was seduced by the experience of the film, and only afterward felt slightly dirty upon realizing what a work of propaganda it was. For one thing, drug use is shown in a wholly positive light. No one gets addicted, has a bad ...
More About: Film , Secular , Sublime

Signs of the Apocalypse: Divorce Expo
2007-10-29 12:14:00
An event held this past weekend in Austria suggests that none of life's milestones are safe from commercial exploitation. From BBC News: Austria is to host the world's first "divorce fair" this month, aimed at helping couples untie the knot as painlessly as possible. The event, taking place in Vienna, then Linz and Graz, will allow would-be divorcees to consult lawyers about their rights and seek advice. The divorce rate in Austria hit an all time high of 50% in 2006, with 66% of marriages in Vienna ending in divorce. The two-day fair is being held under the motto "New beginning".... Up to 20 exhibitors have registered so far, not only lawyers and mediators, but also estate agents, life-crisis experts, private detective firms and DNA laboratories offering paternity tests. One company will offer therapeutic package holidays for newly divorced people. There will also be a series of lectures on subjects like how divorce affects children and coping as a single parent. I say, why stop ...
More About: Divorce , Expo , Signs , Apocalypse , Divo

Drive-Thru Church
2007-10-24 18:03:00
  The ultimate in seeker-sensitive ministry! Hat tip to Church marketingsucks.com.
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Jessica Williams: "Over Easy Eggs"
2007-10-24 17:26:00
Over Easy Eggs 10/16/07; 3:46am EST the castles in my femorathey have declared war on my circulationred and blue flagsi have turned purplemy jawis falling off my headand crushing the nerves in my necklike a mother bird cooing to her chicklets' bonesmy bloodis turning to teaa few of its leaves like driftwood in my heartbeating with meas tumorsmy liver won't filtermy earsmust smell like the oceanfor my hair has turned to seaweedhumid, the brainmy noseis in my neck, toobut it's an infectious swampi want to pluck out all its black treesand feel the satisfaction of stinginglet the mucus skithe lines in my palmsare meltingon the carpetand across the roommy stomachis growing cactiand i can feel the tumbleweeds rollingrolling rollingacross the prairiethat is my membranemy pelvishas swallowed iceit is sore from impactfrom my lust for youi lie down and feel only whale harpoonsmy eyeshave forgotten my facethey feel like snorkeling gogglesthey won't be blue tomorrowwhen i look at the suni fe...
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Transcending Singularity
2007-10-18 11:41:00
Apropos of my latest post on fear of the moment, here are two essayists -- one a Chassidic scholar, the other a Christian painter -- with encouraging insights into how imagination and spirituality help us not only transcend the particularity of our lives, but actually turn it into a richer experience than that of mere undifferentiated Being.At Chabad.org, Yanki Tauber writes in his essay "Three Divine Echoes: Singularity, Plurality and Oneness": Creation, as described in the teachings of Kabbalah, is an evolution from the utterly singular to the plural and dichotomous. The entirety of existence originates as the divine yen to create -- a desire as singular as its Conceiver. But latent in this desire is also another face of the divine -- the infinite possibilities implicit in G-d's unlimited potential. Thus, the singular desire for creation gives birth to our plural world, a world whose immense detail and complexity bespeak the infinite potential of its Creator.None of this, in...
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Fear of the Moment
2007-10-16 22:36:00
  Being present in the moment is unusually difficult for me. Ever since I was a child, I've had several elaborate fantasy storylines going on in my head, into which I plunge when I'm waiting for sleep, doing routine chores or even going for a walk. Last spring, I forced myself to abandon one of these long-running daydream sagas when I realized it was draining me of interest in my real life. Inhabiting my actual existence was terrifying. I remember standing on the curb outside my house, feeling naked under the huge sky. I was a tiny point on earth that the wind could blow away. I started writing my novel as a replacement for these abandoned scenarios in which I was the heroine of a life more exciting, empowered, or romantic than any real existence could be. Daydreams, like movies and unlike life, are all "good parts" (or at least interesting parts). All my libido was being diverted into unreal experiences. Writing fiction would discipline me to empathize wi...
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Poem: "The Happiness Myth"
2007-10-13 19:25:00
Do you bite the day or does the day bite you:the sun like a gear wheel spinning with    hooked edges,the sun a flaming pizza that greases your    mouth.Tell me why you stopped drinking.Are you in the oven or did you poke the witchinto the fire with her own iron-handled    paddl e?It's not obvious that you should be sober.Happiness spins like a drug lollipop,vortex of primary paints where lick or    be lickedis only a simple choice for boys fighting.The glass of euphoria fits in the palm of    your hand,barely enough to drown your tongue-tip,too much to empty.       ;      &nbs p;      &nb sp;      &n bsp;      A s for me,I now wear my whalebone stays under    my ribs,hoop skirts swishing in my womb like a   &...
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Mark Levine Interviewed at jubilat
2007-10-12 16:22:00
Mark Levine's second poetry collection, Enola Gay, is on the short list of books that expanded my understanding of what poetry could do. His post-apocalyptic, enigmatic ima ges make sense the way a door creaking in a horror film makes sense. You don't have to know what's behind there to realize it's something scary; in fact, it's scarier because your rational mind can't define it. Some excerpts from poems in the book:from Counting the Forests...He was counting the forests. That was his plan.He carried a sack of dried fishprepared by his servant and curedin sea-salt. His servant was near; he could hearthe rasp of his servant's breath. His servant was making the vigil in a mountainsomewhere in the ice-country; and the ice-country   was vastand blue and full of death-forms. So was the forest.Here in the red forest: a forest of birds.Birds and dark water and looming red leavesbrushed with murmuring voices.They swept towards him, the voices, like  ...
More About: Book Reviews , Mark

Interpreting Scripture: A Double Standard on Marriage
2007-10-09 12:06:00
Christians holding the line against recognition of same-sex relationships claim that Bible verses on sexuality must be taken at face value. We're not allowed to point out a particular interpretation's historical track record in fostering abuse and prejudice, as evidence that it's inconsistent with the Bible's overall message of mercy, equality and nonviolence. Nor can we look to history and science to argue that the verse's "plain meaning" may represent an anachronistic reading of words that meant something different in the ancient world. Yet Christians for quite some time have taken a much more flexible, holistic, justice-based view of Bible verses on heterosexual marriage, and the sky has not fallen. Faithful GLBT Christians ask nothing more than that the church apply the same hermeneutic to them as it does to straight partnerships. There's something askew when two straight people who want to break up their family are treated more leniently than two ...
More About: Marriage , Double , Scripture , Standard

Signs of the Apocalypse: Smack That!
2007-10-08 10:36:00
Love your enemies, do good to them that persecute you, turn the other cheek, yatta yatta yatta. Who cares what the Bible says? Just getting our children into a church building has the magical power to save their souls. Let's not scare them off with all that boring content about, like, Jesus and stuff. From Sunday's New York Times: First the percussive sounds of sniper fire and the thrill of the kill. Then the gospel of peace. Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo....Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game...
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To Whom Does the Church Belong?
2007-10-04 19:21:00
In this post I simply want to raise some questions that I don't know how to answer. As with many of my reflections on ecclesiology these days, it's prompted by the ongoing struggle over gay rights and Biblical authority in the Anglican Communion.The obvious answer to the title question would be "Jesus".  To which a beleaguered rector or worshipper might respond, "Yes, but...could you be more specific?"In other words, when conflicting factions differ on many of their basic assumptions, it's not enough to say "we're following Jesus" or "we're following the Bible". Whose Jesus, which Bible?On a more practical level, who gets to set the direction of a particular parish? The global denomination, the country's presiding bishop, the rector, the lay members? I've experienced this conflict from both sides of the fence. Last year, when the then-minister of my Episcopal church was tugging us in a Unitarian/skeptical direction, I felt personally affronted. "...
More About: Church , The Church , Belo

Christina Askounis: "The Novice"
2007-10-02 18:14:00
From the Fall 2005 issue of Image, this restrained, lyrical story traces the bittersweet spiritual awakening of a middle-aged bachelor whose adopted daughter has decided to join a convent: IT WAS Catherine?s last night. Lawson suggested they have dinner at her favorite restaurant, a resolutely untrendy bistro where the aged waiters knew them both by name. ?Since it?s your last night,? he?d said, conscious of the theatrical cast the words seemed to give the evening. Still, it was no more than the truth. Catherine, who tonight looked so lovely, so finished in her black sleeveless dress?Catherine was leaving him. Not the right way to put it, of course. But ever since that long-ago afternoon when she had been eleven and he twenty-eight?only twenty eight!?scarcely older than she was now?he had felt she did belong to him in a way, that they belonged to each other, and now she was going, never to return.Read the whole story here.
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Judy Kronenfeld: "Spaghetti Straps"
2007-10-02 12:17:00
On my campus walk a spring effusionof spaghetti straps, and?Madonna'slegacy?the inside outed, too delicatefor the name of straps, tender, silkybra linguine, tomato-red, celery-green,slipping off creamy shoulders, ortangling fetchingly with those spaghettistraps my daughter informs me, I, as an older woman, can not wear.               ;      &nbs p;      &nb sp;    Once, unwittingly,I draped my navy blazer onthe chairback in my class; twopale pink shoulder pads ploppedup like obscene pincushionsfrom the costumer's shop, abruptlyspotlit. The student they tickled apologized, but couldn't stop laughingeach time he looked. NowI pull my jacketaround me, though it's hot,      & nbsp;               ;      &nbs p;   t...
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Lance Larsen Interviewed at Meridian
2007-09-30 18:41:00
Award-winning poet Lance Larsen is the editor of Literature and Belief, the literary journal of Brigham Young University, where some of my poems have been privileged to appear. In this 2003 interview, he discusses writing and faith with Doug Talley at Meridian Magazine, a publication of Provo College in Utah. Highlights: MERIDIAN: Do you see yourself as tending toward melancholy, and if so, why?LARSEN: I don?t see myself as being melancholy, at least not unusually so. G.J. Nathan once said, ?Show me an optimist and, almost without exception, I?ll show you a bad poet.? Why? Because bad poets don?t usually wade into trouble; they don?t dive. If the scriptures and classic literature can be trusted, and I think they can, only trouble is of much interest. At heart I?m a romantic---but a romantic who believes that visions aren?t worth much if they aren?t tested by everyday living.****MERIDIAN: ...Do you, yourself, see the poems as largely autobiographical, or were you trying, instead, to ...

"The Approach" and Other New Poems by "Conway"
2007-09-27 18:48:00
My correspondent "Conway" has been very prolific this summer, writing poetry inspired by the books and printouts I've sent him: T.S. Eliot, Alexandre Dumas, Stephen Dobyns, and even yours truly. Conway is the pen name of a resident in a maximum-security prison in California, where he's serving 25-to-life for receiving stolen goods under the state's draconian three-strikes law. Here's a selection from his recent work:The ApproachThe Sky offers empty promisessmiling with toothy cloudsblades hiding in the invisible windpushing forward an orgasmic rainwide open mouth, stuttering-n-droolingover the gloriously ravaged landpolished and preened for the danceelectric frustration cracklinginstinctive thunder cacklingdestructively loud vibrations cussat all of mother nature's fussprimping for her approaching sunanother beautiful day begun...****PretenderSmell the dust circulatingrumble of gears, chattering windpushing past shadows of patience againpressed faces on clear glass, melted sand...
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"Grateful, Thankful" to Literal Latte
2007-09-25 12:47:00
The online journal Literal Latte has just posted their current issue, containing my story Grateful, Thankful, which won second prize in their 2006 fiction contest. This excerpt from my novel-in-progress finds Prue coping with the competing pressures of teenage sexuality and academic achievement. (Sex in bathrooms is becoming the King Charles's Head of this book; it just seems to find its way into whatever I am thinking.) Here's the opener: I could have avoided all that trouble if only I had remembered the capital of North Dakota. Normally I took schoolwork seriously, but it had been a late night at band practice and I decided to give myself a pass on memorizing stupid places I would never live. I couldn't see my mother moving us anywhere shotguns were more popular than cappuccino. I dropped my regulation #2 pencil and bent down to fetch it, so that on the upswing I could skim a peek at Ryan McFarrell's test paper. He winked at me, those blue eyes wide under s...
More About: Site News , Fiction , Hank

Old and New Friends in Charlotte
2007-09-23 19:21:00
We had a wonderful trip to Char lotte , NC this past week, where I read my prizewinning story at the monthly meeting of the Charlotte Writers' Club. Many thanks to contest coordinator Annie Maier, president Richard Taylor (editor of the Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets), and other club officers for making me feel like a queen for a day. My tech-savvy but overworked husband made a video of the reading, which I will post here as soon as I can prevail upon him to extract it from the camcorder. The featured speaker at the meeting was poet and novelist Karon Luddy, another past winner of the CWC's short story contest, who read a touching and hilarious excerpt from her new book Spelldown. Set in a South Carolina mill town in 1969, this novel follows a quirky, brilliant adolescent girl who is determined to win a national spelling bee, while coping with her father's alcoholism. I am looking forward to reading my signed copy. Karon also read from her po...
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Book Notes: Velvet Elvis
2007-09-23 19:19:00
Rob Bell, the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, wrote a popular and controversial book two years ago called Velvet Elvis : Repainting the Christian Faith. The cutesy pop-culture title, like Bell's friendly conversational writing style, might lead you to dismiss it as a lightweight inspirational book to sell the gospel to Gen-X'ers. Don't make that mistake. Velvet Elvis may just be the emergent church's Mere Christianity. Taking his cue from N.T. Wright and other scholars of the "New Perspective on Paul", Bell wants to restore our sense of the Bible as a living narrative, an ever-evolving interpretive tradition in which we are called to participate, and he does this first of all by situating Jesus within his Jewish rabbinic heritage. Modernism has entrapped Christians into basing Biblical authority on a shared pretense that the text's meaning is objective and transparent -- as if we were saved by the correctness of our propositions, and...
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Ned Condini: "In the Farmer's Hut"
2007-09-23 17:11:00
(after Federico Garcia Lorca)When I feel lonelyyour ten years still remain with me,the three blind horses,your countless expressions and the littlefrozen fevers under maize leaves.At midnight cancer strode out into the hallsand spoke with the empty shells of      &nb sp;documents,live cancer full of clouds and thermometers,with its chaste desire of an appleto be pecked by nightingales.In the house where there's no cancerwhite walls break in the frenzy of      &nb sp;astronomyand in the smallest stables, in the crosses     &nbs p; of woods,for many years the fulgorof the burnings glows.My sorrow bled in the eveningswhen your eyes were two stones,when your hands were two townshipsand my body the whisper of grass.My agony was looking for its dress.It was dusty, bitten by bugs,and you followed it without tremblingto the threshold of dark water.Silly and handsomeamong the gentle creatures,with your mo...
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When Good Art Happens to Bad People
2007-09-17 18:51:00
Gregory Wolfe, editor of the award-winning literary journal Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, has a new blog that should be on the regular reading list of anyone interested in the intersection of the arts and religion. In his article In God's Image: Do Good People Make Good Art?, published in the magazine In Character and linked from his website, Wolfe ponders whether creativity could be considered a Christian virtue, and how this understanding of the creative process differs from the Romantic cult of genius, in which the personality of the artist becomes conflated with the work itself. As we all know, sublime art is often made by very flawed people, and vice versa. For some religious people, this would seem to undermine art's claim to be a spiritually significant activity. Unless aesthetics are strictly subordinated to moral concerns, artistic creativity could be a gateway to idolatry, worshipping the powers of the self unconnected to God or community. Wolfe suggests a less egocen...

Signs of the Apocalypse: Action Jesus
2007-09-12 18:00:00
It's almost too easy to make fun of Jesus kitsch, but if there were a Bulwer-Lytton Prize for the most delightfully awful representations of the J-Man, these statuettes at We Are Fishermen would win it. The hallmark of bad Jesus art is a belabored literalness that puts the big guy in situations that are anachronistic to the point of campiness. How will we know it's Jesus unless he's got the crown of thorns, the blissed-out smile and the white bathrobe? But dude...I know you have special healing powers, but you're going to get seriously banged up if you fall off the motorcycle wearing that outfit. This sacrilegious moment courtesy of MadPriest (who else?) who is looking for suggestions for items that would be banned from the Lambeth Conference gift shop. (The very existence of which is another Sign of the Apocalypse -- come on, guys, good taste is the only thing the Anglican Church has left!)   Update: MadPriest's equally mad commenters note that Ship of...
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Meet My Imaginary Friends in Charlotte, NC
2007-09-12 16:39:00
"The Albatross", a chapter from my novel-in-progress, has won the Elizabeth Simpson Smith Award for a Short Story from the Char lotte Writers' Club. The award ceremony, where I'll be reading my story and accepting a check for $500 that I've already spent, will be held on Sept. 18 at 7 PM at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 4345 Barclay Downs Drive, Southpark Mall, Charlotte, NC 28209. Come one, come all.Contest judge Meredith Hall, author of the memoir Without a Map, had these comments on "The Albatross": "The voice in this story is knockout wonderful. A child's voice is always very difficult to pull off. Often a child's voice is very sentimental, rosy, sweet, and we quickly become suspicious. More than that, the reader expects and needs greater wisdom and insight than a child possesses, but the writer must take care not to insert that adult sensibility into the child's perceptions. Here, Prue is so smart and so direct and so hungry to understand her world, we are led along by her, and...
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Poems for September 11
2007-09-11 21:45:00
Today is the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Rather than add my own words to a subject that is nearly beyond words, I share below a winning poem from the Winning Writers War Poetry Contest that I judge every year.SUMMER RAIN by Atar HadariThis is the season people die here,she said, Death comes for them now.Sometime between the end of winterand the rains, the rains of summer.And the funerals followed that summerlike social engagements, a ball, then another ballone by one, like debutantesuncles and cousins were presented to the great halland bowed and went up to tendertheir family credentials to the monarchwho smiled and opened the great doorsand threw their engraved invitations onto the iceand dancing they threw their grey cufflinksacross each others' shoulders, they crossed the floorand circles on circles of Horasfilled the sky silently with clouds, that chilled the flowers.And funeral trains got much shorte...
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