The parade.
At the same time and same place where I lift weights.
What a PIA.

Don’t know what parade?
You are obviously both not from either coast and walking around with blinders and ear plugs.
Much to the chagrin of some and joy of others, the New England Patriots continue their dynastic ways.

But I’ll adjust to conditions.
Leave my apartment at 9.00am instead of 9.30am.
Take some photos of the gathering.
Lift.
And be back on the street at 10.45am, the parade launching itself at 11.00am from the Hynes, just two blocks from the café I frequent.

The big problem: Cannot get across Park Street where the duck boats will be rolling.
Solution: Go underground. Take the red line T from Downtown Crossing to the Park Street stop, just one block.
But what a key block. (That sounds like a TV football analyst.)
That block gets me underground to the other side of Park Street.
When I emerge from the T I am beyond the cram of the crowd and Walking away from it.
Sweet.

The things we do to help our championship teams.
Whew!

Oh, yes, Go, Pats!

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Tagging Today
Wednesday, February 6, 2019

My 300th consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
Time is 12.01am.
On Wednesday, Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 36* with a feels-like temperature of 32* under mostly sunny skies.

According to the Blog’s “Winter Calendar, Jan2 to Feb13,” we have only seven days remaining to our winter.
The “Winter-Spring Shoulder Season, Feb 14 to April 7” is our next calendar; our next measurement of time as we march the thirteen plus years to the 5,000th and final posting.

_________________________________
Question of the Day
What has Howard done for us lately?

_______________________________
Short Takes
So, my nephew Steve Di Mino of Las Vegas, Nevada phoned me with a good idea. I should post my blog onto a platform, Minds.com.
A good idea.
I’ve started it.
Will seek help understanding it.

In any case, he said ‘Goodbye’ thusly:
“Hey, Uncle Dom, (Steve a polite guy,)
“Have a good day.
“Unless you have other plans.”

A funny guy, my nephew.

Sally Chetwynd sends this note:

LOVE the gaggle of sleeping toddlers! Great photo!
Getting deeper into "Dom's, An Odyssey."  Captivating!

Sally 

Web Meister Responds: Thanks, guys.

Answer to Question
What has Howard done for us lately?
His response:

I’m sending this because you’re an Italophile and Italian culture booster.

I was too, even more so, sort of, back in the salad days of my PhD studies. When I was also a poet, who had a very restless mind, I would seize on anything I stumbled across in my wide-ranging studies, always willing to follow even the most arcane allusions and references (and all before computers, internet, search engines; I had to do it all in a library, with books and journals as references). What made this unusual is that nominally my specialty was in 20th century American Literature, and my doctoral thesis was about two quintessentially American writers, who didn’t have much to do with Italian literary or political history.

Why now? I am, in one of my long-term intermittently executed projects, archiving my juvenilia.

Here’s a poem I wrote when I was about 24. It was one of several, all of them very different, so this is an example only by its singularity. Each year, as it still does, the school (Bryn Mawr) awarded a cash prize to students for the best collection of poems, and a separate prize for the best single poem. The money came, as it still does, from the Academy of American Poets. I’m pretty positive I’ve mentioned this to you before, so I won’t belabor it with the details, which are amusing.

Anyway, this poem was one from a collection I submitted (winning the prize) one year. The only other year I was in residence I also entered (and also won).

The poem is full of allusions, all authentic and subject to follow-on reference. The title refers to the necropolis of Rome, that is, the cemetery, or, quite literally, city of the dead. I’m not sorry for all the esoterica, cultural allusions being so out of fashion. I was simply giving in to my admiration for one of the kings of making classical allusions in modern poetry, T.S. Eliot. Who?

The Domus Aurea is the massive new imperial palace built by Nero after so much of the city was destroyed. It wasn’t just big, it was massive, it and the grounds covered anywhere from 100 to 300 acres (scholars still debate the actual figure). Much of it ended up buried, and still unexamined, because succeeding emperors and the Senate were so upset about his excesses. The palace proper had at least 400 rooms, each intended for entertainment, though they have yet to discover what could be assigned to use as sleeping quarters or kitchens.

Interest in the Domus Aurea was re-kindled when, as the poem relates, a young man, sometime during the Renaissance, fell through the earth covering the extensive buried lower quarters of the palace, and landed unscathed below. The reference to Michelangelo and the ancient statue of Laocoön also is accurate.

I am trying to retrieve this early work of mine in order to publish it as a book of these poems. A small book, of a genre called a chapbook. It will be previewed in bertha magazine, my general interest magazine of things worth observing closely.

If this poem doesn’t calm the unsettled nerves of the mood of my last two messages, I simply don’t know the sedative effects of really really boring poetry…

City of the Dead

miserae plebis commune sepulchrum
—Satires

 I

 We no longer need your bones.
We have drunk enough of your orchid bodies.
Through the sullen cryptoporticus,
Beyond the loam brown passageway
The merd brown doorway,
The boggy walls
Beneath the cistern curved and caverned ceilings:
O down flow stream
Down stream
Sped down
Down caught spring.
Rain water sifts through paupers' graves.
Nero's guests drunk
From these moving waters like bloated antelope .
Now, the spring is dry. 

II 

We buried the poor
Without the republican wall;
The priapic grave markers,
Moans spouting from the headless
Kneeling tunics,
Purple winds blowing from the south.
Their limbs bent like new parchment.
We hardly buried them at all,
More or less pushed them in the ground
Urging the earth to take the bodies.
At night fleecy witches came
To fetch their tumbril shanks,
Their empty skulls with eye sockets
Like the bursting nostrils of a thirsty camel.
At night the witches came to take the paupers' bones
To spice their wicked stews. 

III

Within the Wall, against the Esquiline,
Nero built his fiddler's palace.
He tiled the walls with portraits
Of his piece-meal friends.
Nero’s green mother never lived to see it.
She never lived to see the fountains foam
Like wool from the raisin cluttered floor.
At night the walls squeaked.
Some said it was the sizzle throated witch
Of the necropolis.
Others said it was the poor pushing
Against the grave walls with their happy bones,
Trying to flesh out Nero’s pictures.
The upper floors are gone.
A man found the lower chambers by shooting through
A hole like a papyrus stalk. 

IV 

The Egyptians,· "bread-eaters," wore their teeth out
On their bread. The Romans·filled their yellow
Teeth with wax. When they could not eat they drank.
When they could not drink they died.
In the basement of the Domus Aurea
They found Laocoön, the snake coiled around his body
Like a map of Italy.
Fugue-like Michelangelo grudged an admiration for the piece.
Indecisive marble fell away at the flute of his chisel.
He dug for the marrow of the stone.
In the little interstellar interstitial spaces,The folds of hungry drapery or Moses' ear,
In a cupid's armpit
Or Jesus' smiling navel
Michelangelo rubbed with tiny bones,
Bringing out sepulchral lusters.

________________________________
Good Morning on this Wednesday, the 6th day of February.

We talked about the Pats’ victory rally from a narcissist’s point of view.
We talked about time and temperature, especially time. The calendar has just ticked from 5% to 6% of the way through. 5,000 seemed so distant a year ago, 300 days ago. It’s a tiny bit closer now.
And we shared a chuckle sent in from Steve and a quick note from Sally.
Finally, we printed a lovely piece with background from one of our favorite writers, Howard Dinin,

Now it’s time to go.

Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?

See you soon.

Love

Dom