Old Sunrise

This sunrise over Market Street out my window is two weeks old. I didn't remember taking it when I emptied my camera onto the computer and it appeared amidst the conscious shots. I forgot it like I would forget a dream. Look, I captured two ghosts on Hawley just past the crosswalk. I had to tweek it to get some contrast thus the robust gold tint. Robust is a popular word in business and politics lately, you noticed? Robust legislation, etc. You used to never hear it but it's everywhere now "Language is a virus," as Laurie Anderson said.
I used to live right on Main St. looking out over downtown. At 4 in the morning the streets and sidewalks are deserted. You can see how wide the street really is; the way it looks on the old pre-automobile postcards. A few cars linger...perhaps left by responsible folks who caught a ride home with a sober friend. These cars are the meter-people's first stop at 8AM. Gotcha! I wonder if horses and buggies were ever ticketed back in the old days. I can imagine someone contesting a citation. "The horse ate the damn ticket."

Lately I've adopted a more aggressive cherry-picking motif in my life. I find the good song or two on a record and rescue them from the rest. I put them with all the others on an iTunes playlist, currently called Wedding/Funeral Playlist. Mediocre songs can eat time alive. I also have no problem skipping chapters in a book if they're not holding me. In younger days I'd just stop reading the book for good. It applies to many situations. If I realize I'm not going to be able to finish a pizza (I hate leftover pizza, so a pie gets just one sitting) I don't just eat as many full slices as I can manage and then stop. I eat the good parts of each slice that have the pepperoni on them and leave a pile of scattered "pizza bones" as Bill Stepchew's son used to call them. And for the record, those dough tumors that bubble up on a pizza piss me off. They rob perfectly good acreage from the pie. When those damn bubbles are on a pizza, they shouldn't serve it, god dammit.
Here's a piece of a Franz Wright poem (Wheeling Motel). How persnickity is this? Like the pizza, I don't just pick the poems I like from the book, I pick the parts of the poem. "Egads" as my grandmother used to say.

Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining
the tear on a dead face.

Awesome. I also like this line from Daisy Fried's review of Wright's new book, also called Wheeling Motel, in the New York Times Book Review.

"Franz Wright is uningratiating, bumptiously witty, inexhaustibly joyless, and routinely surprising."

Bumptiously! And how about this one. When's the last time you saw the word cotton used as a verb?

"...those who are strenuously traditional or strenuously hipster won't cotton to Wheeling Motel."

I like the review better than the book I think. Hell, who needs books with robust reviews like Daisy's?