Rustles of --? (Coz, Foto)

Rustles of --? (Coz, Foto)

Dear Coz,
° Can you divine what these signs are signs of?

1. 21 gennaio mmv--first mosquito bite
2. 10 marzo mmv--first wasp sting
3. Easter Sunday (Western Church)--first tick bite
4. 29 marzo mmv--first squashed serpent in the road
5. 1 aprile mmv--first wistaria bloom

° Answers: No, no, no, no, and no.

1. No, not global warming. Remember that our rulers know more than we do, that is why they are our rulers and we are their Schiavi.
2. No, not an early Spring. A colony always overwinters inside my East chimney, I was the heedless provocateur.
3. No, not spotty fever. Just a reminder that I must soon decide between flavouringup my blood with cinnamonandvanilla, or else with dark chocolate, since for the next ten months I’m to be dessert for Brother Deer Tick. If only I knew which savour he prefers . . . .
4. No, not Viagra. Though everybody else seems to need it, miao.
5. No, not the beginning of Summer. It only means that Lucifer is counting his lucky stars he relocated to the balmy climes of Heaven, for budding wistaria, hereabouts, guarantees a hellchilling late freeze.

§§§§§

° Do you see the tree outside young Giac’s dorm window? That’s the tree from which the lay sister told us spiders jumped into our bedrooms and left those itchy weals all over our bodies each morning. Albeit none of us ever laid eyes on a one of the little critters.
° Thank goodness we didn’t know what they really were.

° Timetravelling, Giac.

Salve, Festa Dies! (Piers)

My wellloved Piers,
° Lamentations, Reproaches, Tenebraes factaes sunts.
° Angelus ad Virginem.

° I know you were torn between your professional duty to worship Death Most Holy, in company with the aging Mel Gibson and the entire Western Church, and your instinctive delight in worshiping la Guadalupe on the Festival of the Impregnation of the Mother of God.
° I know you accomplished both, if only by a DeiGenetricial leitmotiv inserted slyly into your voluntary.

§§§§§

° Life and Death.

° Life or Death.

° Birth and Death, Death and Rebirth.

° None of them parallel terms, none of them opposites, our language lies in confusion.

° In the same state, Giac.

P. S. I failed to dandle Panama upon my knees yesterday; for Heaven’s sake, make it up to her. This morning I found the Grim lying bellyup, dead as a doornail, in the stream, and this afternoon a blackbird in the same condition, under a box bush. Best not to tease Destiny . . . .

Peaking Too Soon (Foto) 

Peaking Too Soon

° How blest are they who are popped out and reared in a tarpapered orange crate, or, more fortunate still, they who are whelped by a tenderhearted crack ho in some midwinter backalley of Gotham Ghetto.
° For they can scarcely go downhill from either beginning.

§

° Poor me, I was clinically delivered, not even midwived.
° And just look at the first garden I lived in. Tenfoot high, threefoot thick brokenglasstopped walls around the entire convent. Arbours, immaculately spaded gravel paths, palms, lemons, a sustaining kitchengarden to the side. Only one entry (the double doors were never opened in my time), and that guarded by a lay sister, summoned by a buzzer night or day, no curfew, she never slept.

° Just look at late winter: an extensive border of frostresistant beefsteak begonias. In fact it’s bergenia (mostly) in thick pink bloom. Look closer, and see the Italian arum intermingling. ((My one attempt at bergenia purpurascens here in the Valley perished without comment. But the arum is tough as shoeleather.))

° Across the street, the parish church.
° It was scarcely a century old, and by no means good enough for us. Nearby San Pietro in Montorio would’ve done, but it was forever in restauro.
° So S. Maria in Trastevere, and, for musick lovers, S. Cecilia were our tutelary temples.

§§§§§

° Years later I found a second toogoodtobetrue dwellingplace: my Austrian friend Riccardo’s flat in the attic of a palazzo overlooking Piazzale Flaminio. One could peer out the window and imaginarily look clear down Via del Babuino to the Propaganda della Fede, or clear down the Corso to Vittorio Emanuele, or clear down Via di Ripetta to the Tiber.
° For garden there was Villa Borghese.
° For parish church, S. Maria del Popolo.
° For caffè, the one on the left.
° For playground, Rome, Romulus’s Rome, Catullus’s Rome, Julian’s Rome, Barbarian Rome, Papal Rome, Risorgimento Rome, Rome.

§

° I wonder does he still hold the lease, Riccardo?

° Timetravelling, Giac.

Peaking Too Soon (Foto II) 

The Word on Abortion (Coz)

Dear Coz,
° Brother Sun has entered Pisces, and you know what that means.
° Yes, one year nearer the time when the Juggler must carry on without his Cousin Fool.

§

° In his latest book, the Bishop of Rome once again compares abortion with Hitler’s Holocaust of Hebrews, Samesexer Men, Jahweh’s Witnesses, and Gipsies.
° And the Jewish rabbis (but not Pope Gaitano, the Presiding Witness of Jahweh, nor the Baron of Romanya) were on him like ducks on a junebug.
° The Bishop of Rome apologised for his misspeakment.
° Such times as we do live in.

§

° You, born gipsily genetically ordained, ordained at 21 tua sponte, and ordained latterly by the Tarocchi themselves--you will do well, lo Sciocco assente, to remind the world what Jesus had to say on the subject of abortion. Just remember not to apologise for Jesus’s saying it.
° And this is what he said:

° And the reason he said nothing about it will have been because he was a man, and he well understood that men cannot legislate for nonmen, women cannot legislate for nonwomen, faggots cannot legislate for nonfaggots, nonfaggots (per così dire) cannot legislate for faggots, und so weiter, und so weiter . . . .

§§§§§

° But la Guadalupe, a nonman, did speak.
° And this is what she had to say:

Exsurgens autem Maria in diebus illis ((dopo, vuol dire, il 25 marzo)) abiit in montana cum festinatione, in civitatem Juda; et entravit in domum Zachariae, et salutavit Elisabeth. Et factum est, ut audivit salutationem Mariae Elisabeth, exsultavit infans in utero ejus, et repleta est Spiritu Sancto Elisabeth; et exclamavit voce magna, et dixit: Benedicta tu inter mulieres, et benedictus fructus ventris tui; (Sancta Maria, Dei Genetrix, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae).
Et unde hoc mihi ut veniat Mater
Domini mei ad me? Ecce enim ut facta est vox salutationis tuae in auribus meis, exsultavit in gaudio infans in utero meo ((nascerà, si sa, il Cugino Giovanni il 24 giugno seguente)).

° So that’s that.
° At least until some Patriarch comes along to outrank the silent Christ and the guiding Mother.
° And that, as any Fool will tell you, will be a very long until.

° Il tuo proprio Cugino, Giac.

P. S. Non si vergognano questi cherici del fingere di saper più che non saprà la Vergine Madre di Dio?

Ovid and the Knitting Kneedles (Lad)

Dear Lad,
° As I have asked you so many times,

uestra quid effoditis subiectis uiscera telis
et nondum natis dira venena datis?

° And as you have so many times retorted,

Say what?

§

° Vera Drake finally wended her way to Colliverdi Cinema. Just on the off chance that Miss Staunton would win a gold plastic Osgood, and on the off chance that some judaeochristianislamist or paganovidian zelotes wouldn’t bomb the cineplex.
° So that’s how it was done. Vera, in her desire to "help young girls out," uses a tinnedmetal grater (I still have one, I still use one), coarse cheddarcheese side, to shave carbolic soap (this was before my time, but it sounds potent) into teakettleboiled water. She uses a gassiphoning rubber pump (at least I don’t know what else it could’ve been designed for) to introduce the fragrant, foamy liquid into the younggirlinneedofhelp’s uterus, tells her to wait a day or two till she feels a right sharp pain "down there," then go to the toilet and expect a bleeding during which "it will all come away."
° Her success rate is 100%, her complication rate about the same as commercial abortiondoctors’ nowadays. That is, next to 0%.
° And anyhow, it sure beats the dogdoody out of knitting needles or--well I don’t rightly know what the "or" would be.

§

° Ovid’s "dira venena"? Old Pliny prescribes juniper oil as a spermicide; and since juniper oil would undoubtedly remove the soles of a barefoot savage’s leathery feet, with one light application, I daresay it would do the trick. Inside the uterus, I mean to say.
° No rubber siphons back then, but nice goatskin pastrybags, I shouldn’t wonder.
° As for the effodere, to excavate a ditch in the uterus . . . .

§

° Colette, writing for a far more repressed and censored literature, seems to know of the "dira venena," (ingested, I perhaps misthought). She chooses to depict the backalley consequences of the nasty, reused, rusty coat hanger.

° Poor little vaudeville girl, twice victim to censorship . . . .

§§§§§

° But the question is, what did I know? What did we know, back in the Good Old Days?
° We knew (at 10) why the neighbourhood girl had to go up north for a few weeks. We lightly tut-tutted her for her disgusting ways (cioè, for having dogpee buttsex in the first place), but never gave a moment’s thought to illegalities or chooselife moralities.
° And we approved her fastidiousness in going off among strangers, for we were perfectly informed of every last miscarriage of every last woman in Kosciusko, and were perfectly aware that most of them were what would nowadays be called "abortions," performed as a golfingbuddy favour by the family doctor.
° What poor women did, nobody knew.
° Or, of course, cared.
° Poverty, after all, we (at 10) well understood was God’s just punishment for any married couple so sexcrazed as to perpetrate dogpee buttsex more than twice.
° For as the Gospel does say,

Marat, we’re poor, and the Poor stay poor . . . .

° No, that’s the French, here’s the Latin:

Semper enim pauperes habetis vobiscum; et cum volueritis, potestis illis benefacere.

° Or, as English Vera phrases it,

I help poor girls out of trouble.

° Affectionately, visceribus numquam effossis, Giac.

Disconnected Meme (---)

Dear ---,

° An invitation to backtracking investigation, an invitation to reveal by concealing, or to conceal by revealing. Cool.

° "This is sort of a variation on the travelling meme idea, only without any solid trail to follow except for those immediately involved. Write here what you think should be a response to the sentence given here (the one in bold), and then post the rules and only your response in your own blog."

Mamma may have,

Papa may have,

But God bless the Child that's got,

That's got his own.

--Billie Holiday, Arthur Herzog Jr.--

° Concealing, Giac.