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# _True Faith_

# _True Faith_

POEMS BY

_Ira Sadoff_

AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES, No. 132

BOA EDITIONS, LTD. ROCHESTER, NY 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Ira Sadoff

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition

121314157654321

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Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the County of Monroe, NY; the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 84 for special individual acknowledgments.

Cover Design: Sandy Knight

Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

Manufacturing: Thomson-Shore

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sadoff, Ira.

True faith / by Ira Sadoff. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (American Poets Continuum Series; no. 132)

ISBN 978-1-934414-83-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

I. Title.

PS3569.A26.T78 2012

811'.54—dc23

2011037245

BOA Editions, Ltd.

250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

Rochester, NY 14607

www.boaeditions.org

_A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)_
_The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible._

—Anton Chekhov, "Gooseberries"

## _Contents_

I

True Faith

In Madrid

American

Lament

Down by the Old Mill Stream

The Sound and the Fury (1991)

Oyster Bay

Apologia

On Style

My Country

Blue Catamarans

Surely the Wind

Water Musik

Worry Fills the Brim of My Hat

All the Secrets Are Not Scars

Adam

In Virginia

In a Southern Climate

Dies Irae

II

_Maybe_

Orphans

Question

Objectively, in Church

A Mighty Fortress

Diagnosis

The War

Chamber Pot

Once I Could Say

Like Magic

Stirhouse

The Gift

Elegy

III

America II

The Aftermath

Lapses

Before

Id

Self-Portrait

While in Brooklyn

For Beauty

What I Meant

In My Little Paradise

Ex-Wives

My First Roses

Country Living

Happenstance

To the Gods

The Numbness

Because We Have Failed So Often

At the Polynesian Paradise in the Mall of America

Dispel Me

Revival

Heavens

_Acknowledgments_

_About the Author_

_Colophon_

## I
## _True Faith_

True faith belongs to the truly unstable,

To those enormous sunflowers that keep crows away

With their bowed heads almost touching the garden floor.

The prayers of my friends too are passive-aggressive.

They begin with "I bet you're not listening, you bastard."

Then they incant some hard-bitten phrases

Learned by heart after they learned to be scathing

And doubt-ridden, after they heard "bed-ridden,"

After the coughing fits, the scams and the accidents

That sought them out. After weeks without sleep,

After some poor slave from Beijing steals their job

And a box store expects us to be grateful

For the toaster that costs fifty cents less

Even though it falls apart in our hands in an instant

The way we fall apart in an instant. We hate the factories

Anyway: the silver filings, the heating coils, the view

Of the brick building next to ours without windows.

It's ok, I spent my best years in a hamper, hiding

From my mother and father. You could see

Through the wicker there, and here I write a sentence

About banishment, the packed suitcase, the secret staircase.

I bring the others inside with me, we hold our breath.

It's one breath, it's the same breath. It's the hush

That chaperones someone as he flies off

The mountain top with just his nylon and aluminum wings

(It's not human), catching the thermal, circling

And descending, until he lands tumbleweed style

In a field adjacent to the vineyard of the Lord,

Followed by beers at the Hofbrau, where we lean

Into one another with joy and shout and toast one another,

Thinking we could have lost this one and that one,

And how quiet the earth would be, and how round.

## _In Madrid_

When the Lord god went belly-up, out of business,

little brats went shin-kicking through the streets of Pamplona.

The watchmaker closed up shop to peel wallpaper off the Vatican.

Nietzsche was in my dream too, in a tedious spat

with Alma Mahler: the syphilis was invisible, so he thought

_These are_ my _thoughts_. Sunny, a hundred degrees. Frozen daiquiris.

I wasn't going to let any sordid affair spill my happiness.

Until the Romanian chipped away at the _Pietà_.

He was driven, bipolar, mood disordered:

at least they could name him this. As for the dark stuff,

blank page after blank page, motives sail by

like an afternoon cloudburst, and I don't want to belabor

the matador, how speared he was, or how she came to me

in a black dress out of Manet and took me in her mouth,

and I'm whispering Dear god, what happened

to my reverence for clarity and a few simple rules of behavior?

Don't make me feel we're all drives and cracked hardware

wired wrong: I want to blame someone, I want to

paint over the underground where I'm waiting at 3 A.M.

for the train, and yes, I'm sure I'm being followed.

## _American_

First time and only time I met LeRoi

we were standing at the Five Spot bar—summer '61:

he was drunk, disgracefully so, which is why

he deigned to talk to me in my white oxford shirt

and hair fluffed up for a future

ivy-league career: I hadn't yet read _The Toilet_

or _The Slave_ , I'd only been fucked twice

by two girls from Queens

with hairdos like spider-legs. I hadn't yet

thrown a brick through IBM's window,

been gassed at Rockefeller Center—maybe once

I'd climbed stairs to the War Resisters League,

picked up an A.J. Muste pamphlet or two.

I might have lived on meringue pies

at the Automat, worked the register at Gristedes.

I remember most of what happened, since

I was sixteen, self-assured, sensitive in the worst way—

no one had even laid a hand on me

yet—but then he raised his black turtleneck

to show me the swollen welts on his ribs

where a cop had throttled him and I had the gall

to insist, "I'm not like that: I'm no racist."

"You just want me to like you," he shrugged,

then the second set began. The next man I met

that tanked up on rage was Archie Shepp.

Every riot you could think of had burned

a putrid city down. For my thirtieth birthday,

he played two short cuts, breathy midrange

off-pitch squawks, shouted the drummer offstage,

then gave us that stare since there was no one

else to look at, to look at what we'd become.

## _Lament_

While I was gone I lost my finches.

The first lilies bloomed. The second and third.

My town lost a lamp store and light in its windows.

My camellias, how pale they seem.

And the grass, how impatient, acting out

With its spray of weeds. Hummingbirds,

I am so sorry. I fell in love a little while I was gone.

I sugared a few doughnuts in her kitchen.

I liked it best when we fumbled around

In the pitch searching for each other.

In the silences there was a great sea between us.

All right, it was more like a pond. But an icy little pond.

My finches, how they would dip and peck.

How bright they were. The finches: how I miss them.

## _Down by the Old Mill Stream_

For instance,

the shallow river was bronze, fish were breathing

along the bank, swelling and deflating, but I don't remember

the green things—if they were natural/unnatural.

In the right light

you could see through them, the scaly creatures

we came from, the way

you could almost see through the statue of David.

You could almost taste the phosphorescence of the ocean

in that one dented half-rusted tin cup no one gave me.

I would only lie down with one person, and she

had not yet arrived, because that was before

the plane was shaking, before bombs fell, before the apple,

well, jesus, it took a while to figure out the flaws

in that story. Let there be no more _in a former life_

or _I've always been under the impression_.

Let the mothers keep their children in the shelter

a few hours more. Because there's nothing like water

slipping through your fingers to teach you a lesson.

## _The Sound and the Fury (1991)_

My friends, the catastrophes came to greet me.

Of pleasure, I'd had too much. Erasure

was the order of the day. Goodbye lover, goodbye

house and home, goodbye life's savings.

One is increasingly minor, which is one way

to fly low over the city

where Tyson bit off Evander's ear,

then Van Gogh's ear, the ear of my ex-wife.

But I too was hounded by a piercing cry.

Maybe it was just a crow; more likely

one of those turgid voices inside struck me

with that dizzying just-hit-your-head feeling,

as if god's emissary had entered me

in a dream or on some lower rung on the ladder,

a brocade of shadow and light so clearly chiseled out

that, ok, my speech was three feet ahead of me.

## _Oyster Bay_

The stench came from the other side of the beach,

or so we thought, since we couldn't see their faces.

That they were probably Black, that they didn't want

the inside of our wallets, that we hid their music

in the closets, is so much pentimento

for the scoliosis. Ditto what we did in bed,

what thousands do with sharp instruments,

or what I wore in Calcutta when I saw

through poverty as the shaggy dress it is:

no romance to it, that singing from the alley.

Its thick vibrato, no Maria Callas in it, no high C beauty.

I want to end this with a view of the bay, the hush

and shhhh of design: my father scribbling plans

on driftwood, instilling goodness in us,

the kind of goodness that spreads shmaltz

on a butter knife then wipes it on his pants: what a god

he was, inscrutable and terrible in unequal doses.

## _Apologia_

I was raised on impudence and finger-pointing,

a handful of addenda and nevertheless-buts.

I want to argue your god with you, god of miracles,

the god who repaired the arthritic arm without surgery,

who sculpted those beautiful oiled-up beauties

at the beach who listen to music made of two notes, maybe

three, whose conversation could be stored inside the skull

of a finch. So whose fault is it I can't bear

their happiness? Why was I in awe when the Romanian

took a chisel to the _Pietà_ , and even if that's technically

not true, where's the joy in horseradish

that makes our eyes tear up? Why not throw a tantrum

as they break glass at the wedding party? I may be low

on mendacity but a few items distress me dearly:

how much time's lost on staggering betrayals, many

perpetuated by yours truly. I don't know who's inside

my body strutting and squirming, twice the size of California,

making the fir trees barely visible, the human race a thimble,

but something sordid makes my lips purse, something pure

exhaust smoke. I step aside from those

who've been anointed to hear voices: they're like bees

under your pant leg that sting and sting, so even

when they're dead because they hurt you, the flesh

is still gristle, swelling and pulsing: that's where my god is.

## _On Style_

In conversation I have but one gear

on my bicycle: always climbing the hill, laboring,

questing, asking questions like _What hurt you_

_when you were young?_ or _How can you believe_

_in god after that?_ My style sends people

up the wall: they make up stories about me,

they psychoanalyze my deficiencies.

That's ok: we all want to know each other better.

There's something niggling about me too—

I can rave about the Vatican (what a tourist trap!),

but once inside the chapel a stranger

collapses, there's a doctor leaning over her in prayer

with a pocketknife he opens up her trachea

and the gasp of air that's her life

hushes everyone, lets me know I've been

wrong, but let's change the subject:

are there hills where you live

and can you ride your bike there?

## _My Country_

_1._

Decipher me, we say to the wilderness.

Perhaps we need our own private radios.

If so, I'd be a station with too much static.

Moreover, that sense-making trick

where you follow a thread

from beginning to end, is wearing thin.

Perhaps you'd like a little history

to accompany the bloody nonsense.

Like Lorca's toast to Franco, the bodega

on a side street where his murmurs

mean less than mudslides in the public arena.

There they'd shoot you for thinking,

whereas here they soften you up

while you ripen until it's a little muddy

in the brain field. Foggy too—to enjoy

the indoor shopping. They give you maps

to locate your heart's desires,

but when it's over there's a heat wave

inside your head: there, the bulls of Pamplona.

_2._

You could say I was delusional, stressed out

when I rode the pampas with Lorca,

you could say imagination got the better of me.

But I'm a sensible person, not prone to delirium,

not the kind who stampedes past the crowd

to simper before the eviscerated flesh of movie stars.

My dad was a starry-eyed sad sack who ran away

with a lounge singer from Budapest. In her sequined dress

she outshone casino lights on the edge of Vegas.

He bet everything on her. Everything meaning nothing,

meaning I'm getting out of this country:

you can have it, Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney,

you can have Bob Sadoff and whatever you do for him.

He's nothing to me, nothing like Lorca, who

I keep in my little boy's knapsack with apples and pears,

a bridle and serenades by Rodrigo and Tárrega.

They take me to prairies where _stipa_

can flourish, but rarely a tree, and surely Lorca

saw this meadow as a place to camp and sing,

since clouds were stirring and future beefsteaks

of America blocked the road to the next bodega.

The dew-soaked grasses seem like his slicked-down hair

I hear him combing: it sounds like a small boat

scissoring the water, followed by a few shots in the alley.

I swear there's a worm in the brain of every boy

who crosses the border, barefoot and dreamy.

From the foothills of the Sierras he can see Granada.

A few silver coins and the moon in his pocket.

## _Blue Catamarans_

Where _they_ grew up, blue catamarans

snugged the harbor. The back-then Blacks and Italians

roped them to anchor. Then they knifed each other late at night

and I don't blame them. The moon over Oyster Bay

should remain with erased populace, just as you'd scrub your hair

for lice. After work, I beat flounder with a baseball bat.

My friends weren't books, after all.

We were made sassy by holes in an undershirt.

Before the skin was kindling, long before

you took your shirt off to the spume and spray

of the ocean, leaning into all that infinite,

where did that get you? How did you like to be

spoken to? Might you like to be passed by,

to be thought of as a meaningless venomous person.

To be reviled, mind-numbing, tedious, dull?

I'm vaguely familiar with exits and squad cars,

have laminated my personal dramas in many documents.

But my interest here is in the beach and the catamaran.

Many catamarans come from tropical islands

where television's a bad, sexy nightmare. If only I'd known,

when I picked up a shell, this nasty smelling shell, on the beach

after a gull dropped it from a very high place.

## _Surely the Wind_

Surely the wind would speak of violence

if the wind would speak. But also valence

when you think of airplanes and their weight

buoyed up and floating, seemingly still

and noiseless—which is how things look

far off, dimly lit: a father's lips blazing

as he dies, slipping in and out of sentences,

sentences that mean so much I can't keep them

by the hospital bed. Better in his kitchenette.

Back there, his voice was hoarse

from shouting. It wasn't a plea, it wasn't flat

and horizon-filled, like the plains.

It wasn't plain speaking either. It was an animal

bray, chomping at the bit when you broke him.

## _Water Musik_

The gods keep depicting us in our weedy randomness.

They buzz and strafe as if _we_ dirtied the water.

We stride away from them, away from the river.

The still river, muddy, debris-skimmed:

seldom is a barge on the Thames a musical occasion.

But seldom is sawdust the story of the tree.

And just because a knife is not a finch wing,

just because we sing jagged arias underwater,

because the standard catalogue of shadows pass over,

it doesn't mean Blouse, Coffin, Notes on a Napkin.

A California quail flusters out of the bushes.

The box of candy opens, Mother, do you remember?

## _Worry Fills the Brim of My Hat_

Mother could temper the willow,

the willow by the river

where she strayed, saying nonsense

to a tree, a tree she found listing.

What little she saw was her savior.

But the words were hieroglyphics,

the jumble of syllables we utter

when we approach the unsayable.

How calm the willow stayed

as the river came up to meet it.

What a well the self would be

if we could find it. I worry

about her in her nightgown,

she who's long gone.

I worry how our minds fill

and empty. As for the tongue,

you can almost feel it

swelling out of its casing,

limber and directionless.

## _All the Secrets Are Not Scars_

Padlocked, the old family mansion.

Enthrall, master and depict,

all ether, unavailable. Over this predicament,

the skull is a mountain.

Other tortured resemblances include

the cliff's my precipice.

Somewhere else she's spitting into a cup.

Dandelion and ragweed stand in

for a family's fortune. The tale in transit,

between being lathered up

and being artistically brushed by one last

self-portrait. The body apologizes

for its flaws. All the secrets are not scars.

All the regress does not address.

Still we feel

for a pulse, the métier to pursue.

Let us thrum through neighboring woods

then, the counseling woods.

To keep the bees away we forgo the swelling,

the visible pinprick on the forearm,

the fever-pitch aftermath.

## _Adam_

So little time left to ruin: I hardly have a minute

to cover up those old rapid-fire faux pas

that left my head turned around, staring into the wreckage,

the old void in my mother, the extraction the minute I was born.

Some rituals die slowly, so the stupid parts of us stay shamed.

When we make ourselves small and sinister,

what nakedness is worth watching? As for our bosses, god,

the Father, the registrar, former lovers and commanders,

our insufficiencies excite them, so they lock doors to their offices

and do what they do there. I am not concerned with being unloved.

Not concerned about a parking space, the mistake

in my checkbook, sour milk in the Frigidaire, not the state

of my soul after a series of drinking binges.

So what is it that incites me, that shadows me with a rucksack,

with a deep raspy voice? A few childhood songs just before bed,

oh and those lanterns—it's New Year's in Beijing—the slate's

graced with calligraphy, all the elaborate figures

and signs— I don't know a thing about them. They're assigned

their own gods and devils, they can't see me close up,

they have their own basilicas, they minister

to their loyal citizens their own shrieks and yammers.

## _In Virginia_

In Virginia they have their drawl and their dogwood,

they've got tactile humidity and a history

that's slavish. They love ideas in Virginia. Virginia's a person

who loves to stall at the malls. She doesn't like

to pay shipping. She doesn't like to drive around town

to save few cents on gas. Am I being too specific? Is there no

Virginia in you? The dancing torso that knows nothing

about tiny sensors they implant to make you want things?

There's a hole in the self: you can't throw a penny down deep enough.

They still have dirt floors in Virginia. Real other-side-

of-the-tracks folks who shine your sweat and mop.

In Virginia we bash mailboxes with baseball bats,

we shake our catalpa pods and we don't talk to stranglers

in that shanty town where we grew up separately.

Virginia, you are my girlfriend, lover, partner, wife,

the one I come back to late at night,

whose fluttery eyelids ship her off to some sleepy island

where a mountain ridge insanely hovers.

## _In a Southern Climate_

All the ambience of Texas once brought me to my knees.

I wanted to praise their wide-brim hats and long cascading lines

to churches, but not the sudden dust storms and downpours

that dim the city of Houston to the charred shade of gray

of concrete yards where prisoners at Guantánamo

still stroll to dreamy tunes by Iron Butterfly an hour a day.

You cannot make up Texas, you who only knew

the President and the President's cabinet, the President's Yes men

and Yes women, the swagger, the high-mindedness.

There was nothing candid there, nothing of nature's shine

reflected on the river (where we don't belong

except to muddy the surface), where black-crowned herons

settle on one foot in the Rio Grande, their minds occupied

by nothing but fish, one particular silver catfish—

they couldn't care less about the crappie, the bullhead, a school

of pickerel—when I'm inside the head of a heron I think

we're so much alike, so much more and less alone.

Oh my seismograph, you are such a personal feeling. A minor figure,

of little import raised to the nth power. But how could I stand here

on one foot all day, pretending you can't see me?

Was I just a little shiver dipping my beak into the water?

## _Dies Irae_

I suspect it's the Dies Irae that gets me going, shaking a fist

at the gathering storm clouds I use as a symbol

of _The sky's a rotten apricot in my pocket_.

Just because the gods made us weave through traffic,

my fellow countrymen think it's fine to turn the oak

into a parking lot, to turn a hillside to a dog on a leash.

The requisite trumpets take me to the War now,

though really, delight in music

is unspeakable, the way it drills little spells inside you:

the Vienna woods are there, a shabby apartment in Prague

with a wooden slab for a bed and a giant cockroach

to sing to. So why do I need words too, a garbled shoebox

of sentences to poke through, a few figurines

that sit on the side of the bed

injecting me with their panic attacks? There they are,

cutting themselves in the mirror, singing

an aria from _Don Carlos_ , and if you don't know

what they do to each other, look it up, look into their faces.

## II

## _Maybe_

_If the sun and moon should doubt_

_They'd immediately go out._

—William Blake

## _Orphans_

I cannot fawn

Dear Lord—oh I see

You tinker

With temperatures,

Bringing loves

For some to bury.

My friends

The diasporas

Shake a few fists

At your favored clouds

About to storm.

I won't deny

Parishioners' joys—

With faces both

Coming and going.

I too want a bliss

Like theirs:

Blankened or beautied.

## _Question_

How did Yahweh

Become a still

Small voice and not

A thunderclap?

In moments

Of transition, the gods

Depart: to translate

Into scripture,

There is none like you

Among The gods,

O Lord, so the Agape

Must search out

The vacated houses,

Although the word

_Agapeh_ once implied

A genuine affection

And deep love

Of the goddess,

Of goodness

We misheard.

## _Objectively, in Church_

The house

Is rocking: blues

Waves a hand

Above the head

And the fingers

Wiggle like

Signifiers. I like

Singing to no one

Just like this.

## _A Mighty Fortress_

A mighty fortress

I'm not, Dear god.

I'm just a flimsy

Little number, hanging

From Bond Street

In 1908; I can't

Afford to live

In a kingdom

I'd call a tenement.

I can't behold

The works

Of desolation

Wrought by no one

In particular

But daily

Abrade my sisters

Who take

In laundry. So

Individual they are,

You might miss them

In the next

Lightning storm.

## _Diagnosis_

What did you think

Of yourself? Stricken,

A Once Favored Nation,

A former savior,

A little Satchmo,

Decrepit and diseased

But still breathing

Hard? 1971: "What

A Wonderful World":

Mount Etna

Erupts, Attica erupts,

The end of the War

Bubbles up, end

Of Empire's on edge,

The country dodders

Over its millionaires.

Light my cigarette

With your sawbucks,

Big Daddy, then

Warm yourself

A little number

By the Hot Five

Over an oil drum

With two-by-fours.

## _The War_

Is a holy war.

Wholly

Scratch your ass

Then get in

The death box:

Say your prayers

Senators:

In the next

Wife you'll harbor

Resentments—

Out of habit

The kill word

Will cross your lips,

A memorandum

Pointed at a person.

## _Chamber Pot_

In the vestibule,

You are obsolete

As we are, we

Scribblers, poets

And painters, pianists

And toe-pointers,

We Solomons

Who worry for

Sons and daughters,

How no one will sing

For them the way

Whitman once chirped

His lament in public.

In his arms,

Soldiers and lovers,

Those who lived

In secret in the country

Of our birth.

## _Once I Could Say_

Once I could say

Loyal friend,

The house wren.

I might even sing

To him. Didn't I

hear the beatific,

The breathlessness

In the patter of voice

Shaking the tamarind,

The feathery bright

Green foliage

Stammered by a breeze?

Those muttering

Implosions, did nothing

Intend them? When

The wren took his awl

To the infested branch

He fed an idea there.

## _Like Magic_

Just as I decide

There's nothing true

About me (can't tell

If I'm more despised

Or ignored, my mind's

Warding off or reeling in

Someone who could scald me

With a spoon of chatter),

Just then I decide

In my seclusion there's a cabin

By the stream and the jangled speech

Of a person is hushed enough

So I say _Hello No One_ ,

_Can you hear me?_

In the rushes I spook

A few geese into flight.

## _Stirhouse_

I was shopping around

In the storehouse

Of lovers, looking for

Not an icon

Exactly, no one

To kneel down to

Praise, no one

To do my dirty work—

The work of

Stripping down to

Take a look, a good look

At what we call

Aftermath—having loved,

Having been scarred

And seared fingers

Used for touch,

I'm not looking

For one fresh

Out of the box.

## _The Gift_

I think of this pendant as an estuary

and I think of the estuary

as a god everyone drifts or swims to,

because what choice do they have

in the delta but to drown

New Orleans again or submit

to "higher powers"? What

would you do, given

such a gift? Mine's

a Sterling Silver Marcasite

& Garnet Glass Heart Pendant:

$70.00 but only $50.00 on Amazon.com.

I am still a boy who as a boy

swam in that estuary. Every river came to me

just for the asking. I never found a pendant there,

some charm that might speak to me

and the rivers, and if the rivers were friends

you could see why I could go there.

## _Elegy_

I tried to stay in the open moment,

the instant perfectly empty:

there's a casket there,

resting, pure silk and mahogany.

The lining may have been lead

and in the rowboat I remember

my regret, having left the island

with all my imperfections

paying attention to the gesture

but not the person no longer a person.

In good times there were ledges

and seals, the cormorants came back,

and the rusty shipwreck was a site

of devotion for those of us

who'd like to preserve a moment

or drag it with us, the living.

## III

_Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth._

—Cordelia, _King Lear_

_For night owls shriek where mounting larks should sing_

—King Richard, _King Richard the Second_

## _America II_

_Trinity Church, New York City_

At last we were struck with a great sorrow, a dark passage

in a Gothic Cathedral, a little strip of light

from the window shining down on the marble floor,

the light cut into strips mixed in with debris

from workers' shoes. They were already

filling in the frescos with pauses, clouds of plaster

on pallets of wood. They restored the surfaces

the way makeup restores faces, except that close-up

we're layered with happenstance and very few

end up pink and refreshed. You can see

erosion in our expressions, as in a Bacon painting

where a face seems twisted by a scream

while the rest of the body minds its business.

Some strayed into strangers' apartments,

then or later, some saw their jobs as circling

a block, as losing patience, losing lovers,

losing jobs, biting their lips, thinning their hair.

A few had been hosed down by police

decades ago, and the force of that water reminds them

of resistance, those clubbing shots, the shoves

that pushed us to the ground or brought us

to our knees to pray. But much remains unknown

about our fevers, those hungers

that have no words around them, no illustrations.

## _The Aftermath_

At first absence did not rush in.

Its brevity was a pause,

a cancellation, a sudden clearing

past the moss beds under the pines.

No more strolls through the old woods,

the same muddy tracks, same old stream.

Of course it was a lull, a blackout:

forgetting makes sleep the salve it is.

I woke to that inky, bottomless hush

that stamps afternoons when you've missed

a morning or can't wait for night to end.

Other mourners want a story stitched up

and ready, they want the next song to play,

they want to shop and love each other.

They want the untrained eye

to forgive the disappearing snow

where that patch of grasslessness

welcomes back the wrens and juncos.

Who can bear those voices, all that singing?

## _Lapses_

I can't just be tracking the lapses,

the deprived and lovelorn about to leap from the ledge,

leaving out the feathery transient random

melodies, some centuries old,

whole symphonies that still stir that stew of fantasy

and biology somewhere inside the calliope

we call the senses. And what is it about

being naked, for example, that made Whitman crazy,

made him a peacock display of self-pleasure?

And why can I still see him ghostly on the ferry

rubbing against strangers who think his touch accidental?

You can almost hear Methodist hymnals inside them

as they look for a property beside the grave site

they're entitled to, to save them from this mindful business,

when all those other tenses—those jobs and promises

and bruises flake away like rust on a barge

before it's repainted that toenail shade of red. So

we must go out to sea, the boundless, bountiful sea

of old literatures, with which we imbue

water imagery—I say _imbue_ because I write for myself

and strangers. I try to shape my strangeness

with speed and gravity, the confusion

you uncover just getting to unknow yourself, the part

that's celibate and monklike, without the flies around it.

## _Before_

This was before the current reign of terror.

Before Gentlemen start your engines.

Before they reported _salient to your habitat_.

Even in our small town, one of those

single-street hamlets shoved against a ridge,

the hills were all snow and sunlight:

echoes and shadows were missing.

I think there were a few loons on the lake,

one hummingbird lathering a camellia.

What stirred us then was strictly unfettered.

I suppose caveats were sad to be invented.

They brought on the chants of Russian monks

(— _oh gladsome radiance_ —), those bass and baritones

who gave birth to earthquakes and creaking

dungeon doors with cavernous, rumbling voices.

Their illegible syllables became the gulags of tomorrow.

Maybe a few were dreaming privately.

But once they dug a few ditches and finger-pointing

became an outdoor sport, the devout were like bees

when the apiarist takes off his veil. And the stings:

you might think the fates had dispensed their arrows.

## _Id_

It comes from that voice dogs can hear, the glass-

breaking high C that makes life sylphlike.

Of course sylphlike's

for pussies. If I say I want a dancer's body,

I don't want to dance: I want to be lithe,

lasting a little longer to take in

the traffic jams. I don't want to look inward,

reflect on, stare at my reflection, nail

another deer on the mantle. Be indelible—

all cobble and boarded-up windows.

Dear reader, I left cupboards open

for your perusal. So trespass my secrets:

I have never cast the petulance aside,

not even just sat with that humlessness.

Can I call that my own personal abyss?

I'm not exempt, I'm no special case, I won't

go around with scissors and a razor blade,

cutting into things, inspecting, shutting down

the operation. I don't want to say nimbus

when I mean shotgun. Or be my friend

when I mean slip it in. Penthouse,

when I mean pent-up house.

## _Self-Portrait_

I sniff after the sparrow and the spaniel, flitting around,

barking, digging up the dirt: how could I not be

at one with them? But I'm a spendthrift too, rummaging about

old sport coats, selecting a style, a clash of styles—

in a private moment trying to decide who I am today by trying on

something discarded, something nobody treasured—

I think I want everyone and everything to be loved so much

I get dour, chastising, dark, and sometimes hate

so much I can't go for a stroll without recycling the moment

they dropped acid on my palm, the thousand ways I could ease

their demise—dipping them into a river of invective

that seems futile and enticing—whether it's the Secretary of State

or a species of white shirts and thin black ties who exude smugness,

who quote from the bible as if it were the Bible. It's like having an affair—

they all end badly, don't they?—thereby the passion flies out of me

like an open window in February: take the heat, world,

disperse it before I undress another thought.

## _While in Brooklyn_

Only one person broke a bottle over your head.

You could strut, you could knock someone

off their perch, pore over their wardrobe

with wise remarks, you could steal a few notions

from the grocer. You could treat a ball field

like a battlefield, you could scar a cheek,

_steal the thunder_ of the little genius and snap

his pens in two. In a pinch you could deliver

for the dry cleaner. You could make sense

of a block, on a good day a half-mile square,

but after that if you cross the bridge

to the marsh that's a swamp you're lucky

if you see a young blue crab squirm

in a stranger's palm. Refineries tower over

the Arthur Kill. Satellites radiate

invisible messages from no one you would know.

There's a government here, a world order

with its cattails and oil spills,

and just under the surface a corpse or two.

## _For Beauty_

For beauty I keep a ceramic swan

Aunt Millie gave me when I was three:

it makes me think of muffins and cornbread

and a sour jug of milk. Never am I happier

than licking pistachio gelato

at Perchè no!, strolling to the Duomo

and looking up at all those heavenly faces.

My reports from the planet earth

have been dismal, serpentine, prone to nicks and cuts.

I always miss the moment when time stretches out

and the human flesh is cloudlike

and fragrant. In one episode I'm so close

to the stage the cellist's every gesture sings

to me, her every eye-flutter

suggests the otherworldly; can I say even now

I hear violins in the background: they're steam clouds

that hover over those who can't balance their books,

whose love lives are strewn with impassible interludes?

But there's my father coming to tuck me in—

I'm dreaming now—to beg forgiveness

long after he's dead. My forehead's blessed.

Imagination's a great gift: you can make it small,

call it escapist, transcendent, fancy, and sometimes

it walks away from the accident; it might haul you off

to a lush little meadow, or the muddy pond

where yaks dip their tongues in the gatorless water

where you can wash off the scratches and bruises.

## _What I Meant_

What I meant by sunshine—cheerful, willful, chipper—

are salvageable parts, but what about broken,

sullen people who can't bear

a shred of felicity? They work late into the night,

stack pants at Sam's Club, they teach

six-year-olds "Frère Jacques"

in Cherry Hills. They get bristly on line at Shaw's

since they're ants on mountains of sugar;

they come out from under shoes

and sandwich plates peddling their goods,

and by goods I mean tin cups we fill

with quarters for off-key hymns

they sing to the sidewalk. We try to straighten out

our soured love affairs, the mangled

sentences we've been given,

but when we address each other with our terrible

knowledge how deeply open life is—

I can't tell if it's a well

or a chasm, but at least it's not the frenzied little busy

who pretends to be sorry, the one who says,

_Blank me, Jazz me up, Fill me in._

## _In My Little Paradise_

So overgrown, the yellow poppies

keel over. After so much beauty,

after the heat spells of August,

a full house and then an empty house,

sweeping up to a little music

(a favorite cup dropped from a shelf),

too many attachments here:

who drank from which glass,

who couldn't bear a phrase,

who became so shrill I'd shrink back

from what's imprinted there. How to take

those ragged bursts of color now,

or the kerchief left behind, a scent

that lingers longer than the person.

How can I keep my own head up

when having been inside someone

is like breathing deeply, but also

having blood drawn?

## _Ex-Wives_

In summer, impalas

feed on young shoots of grass;

in winter on herbs and shrubs where grasslands

meet the savannah, so we don't worry

for their breed. Even as individual

breathing animals, impalas stay invisible

to us, like asides. Graceful, territorial,

we still hear their voices

as they're vaguely piping. Their species

thrive on the plains, even when

they're slaughtered wholesale by jackals,

pythons and baboons. With their white bellies,

their chestnut coats, leaping forays,

we cannot hold onto them

skittering across the plains. Whatever suddenness

makes their hearts race, they are great joys

for all we pour into them

that is not them. We pour into them

the river that rises to their lapping tongues,

the heat that makes their chests expand

and contract like accordions: they play familiar tunes

on a street corner, but not on the street where you live.

## _My First Roses_

My first roses brought me to my senses.

All my furies, I launched them like paper boats

in the algaed pond behind my house.

First they were pale, then peach and blood red.

You could be merciless trimming them back.

You could be merciless and I needed that.

Emerald green with crimson tips,

these were no crowns of thorns.

They would not portend nor intimate.

But if you fed them they'd branch out:

two generations in a single summer.

One had a scent of fruit & violet, the other

blazed up, a flotilla of lips on the lawn.

## _Country Living_

I was just forgetting the stroll grandpa took with Grieg,

then I forgot the blessings

bestowed on me by Jesus, and the amber light at dusk

that made me think the world was somewhere else aflame,

because right now someone's roasting a pig on a spit,

and you can still hear its squeals in the shitpile

they call southern Ohio, where he was once mucking around,

happy as Stanley Plumly. You might not know

Stanley Plumly and you might not know Ronan O'Brien,

who plays the lyric suites as if he and Grieg had a score to settle

(each melody sparking his synapses with surgical precision),

and you might not know the caress of my former wife

when I was distressed, which took up a lot of clock time,

or how we'd visit soup kitchens and shelters

because we tried to think of ourselves as a good people,

and even though the stockbrokers of Brazil may think differently,

our lyric poets believe the body's made for pleasure,

and though you might not know Whitman's "Passage to India,"

or that all the riches of the east were meant for our pleasure,

just as the pig was meant for our pleasure,

and Cambodians and the Shiites, and all of god's music,

and on the porn sites you'd think every young woman's pussy

was designed for our pleasure: to hear them squeal

on a spit you'd think what songs we are, what instruments,

walking with our hands behind our backs as if they were tied,

strolling through Grieg's meadow, talking

about claret, the kroner and the first trillium in the lea.

## _Happenstance_

Happenstance, my hero, my bad habits

I wear like a Sunday dress

at the church social. I am more and more

a fan of _chicanery_

and other obsolete words to indicate joy

that's done and gone.

Where are the cantatas, the canned pears

in wine sauce, where is the first

Ms. Sadoff, and where the second? My mother

will live forever in her bitter claim

on solitude, peering from behind the window.

The empty house isn't empty enough:

moments battered by stepping over them

become silver here, chips of paint

from the radiator shining as I make my way

through the dark spaces so I can save

on electricity, so I don't shape

my thoughts around what's missing,

throwing shawls around them

to give them life and warmth (so essential

in a cold spell). Here are the dances

of and by the fireplace, here are the repasts,

_the chow times_ , here are the little digs

and the private asides where you assigned

your virtues and my vices. Here is

out my very window the yellow window

of November, window of each November,

as long as there are Novembers to remember.

## _To the Gods_

In the pre-regret phase, when I was flammable,

inviolate, a fortress, you could say

I was too particular and when I say particular

I mean fussy, and by fussy I mean

the period of self-study was a bad piano lesson.

Maybe a sweetness came over me, the dreamy

madness of darkening next to someone.

I had the swagger of someone

who made plans for the woodlands.

Maybe I was just a terrible shithead

with the patina of a principled person,

but in those days I had no idea

what ciphers we could be, what souvenirs,

what sad little bunnies, and there

the story veers, since there's no myself here,

or there's a chorus of voices vying for attention.

If I could sing I'd want to distill the thrill

of her, and more I'd want that lilting playful voice

to stay with me, all the sing-song iambs

that forestall the crash of loving

too much, hanging on too long. How can I

embrace the spell-makers and their hovering

cherubim, their harps and gladioli,

the gods who should have looked after me?

## _The Numbness_

The numbness was wearing off,

& my tongue, thick as it was, vaguely recalled

its vital functions: to lick humidity

the body produces when over-heated. Most days

it's used on superiors. While a lucky few

weekend by the waterfront & drink each other in,

spurred on by whatever closed curtains indicate,

I am scampering along in this manner,

taking the stairs two at a time

to my own personal hell—you know,

after you've fallen, some bastard's pushed you

from behind, have you ever tried screaming then?

I was feeling deeply, how small the mouth is.

How small and open. How blank

the hours after work, how cavernous comes next—

then someone's calling from the human race,

there's a rescue party, someone tugs on the rope

and a child appears from the bottom of the mine shaft.

## _Because We Have Failed So Often_

and we betray as we've been betrayed, because in our heads

we're high priests while in our pants we operate

on a cash basis, we can't afford to judge. We can't exclude

our neighbors, old lovers, complete strangers. Except

that President who was a murderer and a liar,

and pedophiles and drunks, drunks who were bullies,

smug characters too, advice-givers. There's certain music—

country or jazz—that sets us on edge, and we abhor

craters left by a drone that smashed the home

of some great-aunt of a Taliban. So it's hard to say

what's left besides bodies in a ditch,

our hard-heartedness, brittle as shell, because we've failed

so often, betrayed and been betrayed, because we're lost

without each other and there are two melodies

in our heads, one for each ear, one by Wagner with anvils

and horns, the other by Mozart, with strings and bassoons.

## _At the Polynesian Paradise in the Mall of America_

When the plaster casters placed Jimi Hendrix's enormous cock on display

in the museum of Great Ideas, I knew the Era

of white suits and mint juleps, the Era of the New Criticism, the Era

of thinking about Eras, was gone. Someone took a ball-peen hammer

to the clean underwear drawer. The coarseness of the concept of brassieres

was laid on a junk heap outside the New York Public Library steps.

I guess unhinged isn't too strong a word to describe

the brouhahas, the upstarts hissing at those who carried the Talmud

on the A train, or those who believed in the drip-down theory

of Economics since their uncles once broke bread with Milton Friedman.

Look it up, I want to say. This is no bite down on a mushroom

hallucination complete with sitar music. This is history

with doors tacking off their frames, with a hinge or two missing.

In the course of Human Events, I have no fucking idea.

Not a glimmer, not even a grimace can appear on my face

without faking the act of faith like some overworked cop

who rattles off the virtues of writing out tickets

and kicks half-dressed indigents off sewer grates in winter

so young couples from Orlando can view the displays

of Christmas scenes from Hans Christian Anderson as a puppet show.

My friends, my vicissitudes, there's something Sufi about me

this afternoon as I wander through the mall

in my tennis shoes, looking for nothing, nothing in particular.

Sometimes the whole world smells like salmon to me.

Sometimes salmon blackened with tarragon and mango sauce,

which I find a comforting reminder of the tropics,

completely manufactured, of course, for the Early Bird Specials,

which brings me back to the Era of preconceived ideas

about goodness and terror, about kindness and terror, about terror

and more terror. Even in college I never tasted

red wine this putrid, even in college I never listened

to the booth next door as a confessional,

where they must choose between the spaghetti platter

and their beta-blockers, where they weigh the virtues

of a panic-stricken night against that cheesecake they love

like life itself. Maybe that's why they shout at each other,

these relics of civilization: to make themselves heard.

## _Dispel Me_

Dispel me, Jesus, if you're not too business.

I'm sliding down the slothful passages

to that heavy-lidded place

where I'm money, office, disingenuous.

Helping hand, excess sweetness.

I look out into blank and peaceful:

quiet, indirection, the most vaporous

of solutions. I look out into blank

and peaceful as if the whole purpose

of the storm were to overturn the skiff.

To shear off... But drowning's

adjacent to breathless, being there

as Violetta sings the last startling aria.

Inflicting and sewing up wounds

when what we require is air and music.

## _Revival_

I was standing between two screams:

shortcomings the virus I spread through a crowd.

This time the stage was heated and galloping,

and vital life forces were the sheen of a horse's back

after a run. The water was choppy too

when the nun removed her habit

and waded into the river. Wading into the river

was an act of faith, not a mandate.

This woman, lover of Christ, as I'm

the lover of Christ, wants him to raise us up

past storm warnings and electrical pulses,

past detonating impulses, wants us

to rise above the given flesh. On my knees,

coughing before the mother of Pearl, I'm shoeless

at the shore of the river, dipping my foot in.

## _Heavens_

Ok, it's sunny, otherworldly, skin-tight

where we're flabby and clouded over, pining away

under layers of jealousy, detachment, the compost heap

of the shucked and dismissed. Out of the bad deeds,

screeches in the arboretum, the wronged person

who circles the rotaries, the infidel

who torments her clitoris, the young man

who discovers he's nameless,

muttering when he should be moaning, shattering

the window of opportunity because—I forget where

I was going with this—perhaps the baffling

cataclysmic lesions that scar us invisibly—

but I suspect, deep down, we're a good people,

easily humbled: we implore, fill with worry,

we try to sing to loved ones, shadow

their wishes, color their hair as they fly

into the great nothing: no more, that's it.

But we can only hold the shell of them,

get on our knees and scrub away

the whole heavy saga. In another world,

people would know exactly how bad we are,

how we seize a dance floor, how we shake

and sweat profusely, how we hum a few bars

through the dead spots, and since we have no idea

what comes next, we set the homestead

ablaze. We bargain, we finagle,

we comb the hair on the corpses, their beautiful hair.

## _Acknowledgments_

Many of these poems appeared (often in earlier versions and occasionally with different titles) in the following magazines:

_American Poet_ : "My Country";

_The Alaska Review_ : "Id";

_The American Poetry Review_ : "Adam," "All the Secrets Are Not Scars" (originally as "Padlocked"), "A Mighty Fortress," "At the Polynesian Paradise in the Mall of America," "Blue Catamarans," "Chamber Pot," "Diagnosis," "Dies Irae," "Dispel Me," "Happenstance," "Heavens," "Id," "In Madrid," "Lapses," "Like Magic," "Objectively, in Church," "Oyster Bay," "Question," "Revival," "Stirhouse," "The Gift," "The Numbness," "The War," "True Faith," "Water Musik," "Worry Fills the Brim of My Hat";

_Brilliant Corners_ : "American";

_The Chattahoochee Review_ : "Surely the Wind";

_The Colorado Review_ : "Down by the Old Mill Stream," "Elegy," "In Virginia," "Orphans," "Self-Portrait" (an earlier version of this poem appeared as "Memoir");

_Cortland Review_ : "In Brooklyn";

_Green River Review_ : "Because We've Failed So Often," "In My Little Paradise";

_Kenyon Review_ : "Lament";

_Massachusetts Review_ : "Ex-Wives";

_Northwest Review_ : "America II," "The Sound and the Fury (1991)";

_The Paris Review_ : "Heavens";

_Prairie Schooner_ : "Apologia," "For Beauty" (an earlier version of this poem appeared as "Even the Rhapsody in Blue"), "In a Southern Climate" (originally titled "In the Current Climate").

"American" also appeared in _The Best American Poetry 2008_ , edited by Charles Wright.

The poems in _Prairie Schooner_ received the Glenna Luchei Prairie Schooner Award in 2007.

"Lament" was awarded the Lyric Poetry Prize by the Poetry Society of America.

I read a number of these poems aloud for the e-magazine _At the Fishhouse_ (fishhousepoems.org).

Special thanks to Gerald Stern, Charles Simic, and Jane Mead for their encouragement and invaluable comments on poems in the manuscript.

## _About the Author_

Ira Sadoff was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 7, 1945. He earned a B.A. in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University and an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. He is the author of seven earlier collections of poetry, a novel, _Uncoupling, The Ira Sadoff Reader_ , and a book of criticism, _History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture_. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1973, he was a fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and in 1974, he was the Alan Collins Fellow in Poetry and Prose at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in _Harper American Literature, Great American Prose Poems_ , and _The Best American Poetry_ series in 2002 and 2008.

Sadoff has served as poetry editor of _The Antioch Review_ , and was co-founder of _The Seneca Review_. He has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and in the M.F.A. programs of the University of Virginia and Warren Wilson College. He currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at Drew University, and serves as the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of English at Colby College, in Maine.
_BOA Editions, Ltd._

_American Poets Continuum Series_

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_The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress_

W. D. Snodgrass

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No. 2 |

_She_

M. L. Rosenthal

No. 3 |

_Living With Distance_

Ralph J. Mills, Jr.

No. 4 |

_Not Just Any Death_

Michael Waters

No. 5 |

_That Was Then: New and Selected Poems_

Isabella Gardner

No. 6 |

_Things That Happen Where There Aren't Any People_

William Stafford

No. 7 |

_The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974–1980_

John Logan

No. 8 |

_Signatures_

Joseph Stroud

No. 9 |

_People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983_

Louis Simpson

No. 10 |

_Yin_

Carolyn Kizer

No. 11 |

_Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada_

Bill Tremblay

No. 12 |

_Seeing It Was So_

Anthony Piccione

No. 13 |

_Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems_

No. 14 |

_Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980_

Lucille Clifton

No. 15 |

_Next: New Poems_

Lucille Clifton

No. 16 |

_Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family_

William B. Patrick

No. 17 |

_John Logan: The Collected Poems_

No. 18 |

_Isabella Gardner: The Collected Poems_

No. 19 |

_The Sunken Lightship_

Peter Makuck

No. 20 |

_The City in Which I Love You_

Li-Young Lee

No. 21 |

_Quilting: Poems 1987–1990_

Lucille Clifton

No. 22 |

_John Logan: The Collected Fiction_

No. 23 |

_Shenandoah and Other Verse Plays_

Delmore Schwartz

No. 24 |

_Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard_

Gerald Costanzo

No. 25 |

_The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems_

Barton Sutter

No. 26 |

_Each in His Season_

W. D. Snodgrass

No. 27 |

_Wordworks: Poems Selected and New_

Richard Kostelanetz

No. 28 |

_What We Carry_

Dorianne Laux

No. 29 |

_Red Suitcase_

Naomi Shihab Nye

No. 30 |

_Song_

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

No. 31 |

_The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle_

W. D. Snodgrass

No. 32 |

_For the Kingdom_

Anthony Piccione

No. 33 |

_The Quicken Tree_

Bill Knott

No. 34 |

_These Upraised Hands_

William B. Patrick

No. 35 |

_Crazy Horse in Stillness_

William Heyen

No. 36 |

_Quick, Now, Always_

Mark Irwin

No. 37 |

_I Have Tasted the Apple_

Mary Crow

No. 38 |

_The Terrible Stories_

Lucille Clifton

No. 39 |

_The Heat of Arrivals_

Ray Gonzalez

No. 40 |

_Jimmy & Rita_

Kim Addonizio

No. 41 |

_Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum_

Michael Waters

No. 42 |

_Against Distance_

Peter Makuck

No. 43 |

_The Night Path_

Laurie Kutchins

No. 44 |

_Radiography_

Bruce Bond

No. 45 |

_At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties_

David Ignatow

No. 46 |

_Trillium_

Richard Foerster

No. 47 |

_Fuel_

Naomi Shihab Nye

No. 48 |

_Gratitude_

Sam Hamill

No. 49 |

_Diana, Charles, & the Queen_

William Heyen

No. 50 |

_Plus Shipping_

Bob Hicok

No. 51 |

_Cabato Sentora_

Ray Gonzalez

No. 52 |

_We Didn't Come Here for This_

William B. Patrick

No. 53 |

_The Vandals_

Alan Michael Parker

No. 54 |

_To Get Here_

Wendy Mnookin

No. 55 |

_Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems_

David Ignatow

No. 56 |

_Dusty Angel_

Michael Blumenthal

No. 57 |

_The Tiger Iris_

Joan Swift

No. 58 |

_White City_

Mark Irwin

No. 59 |

_Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999_

Bill Knott

No. 60 |

_Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems: 1988–2000_

Lucille Clifton

No. 61 |

_Tell Me_

Kim Addonizio

No. 62 |

_Smoke_

Dorianne Laux

No. 63 |

_Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems_

Michael Waters

No. 64 |

_Rancho Notorious_

Richard Garcia

No. 65 |

_Jam_

Joe-Anne McLaughlin

No. 66 |

_A. Poulin, Jr. Selected Poems_

Edited, with an Introduction by Michael Waters

No. 67 |

_Small Gods of Grief_

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

No. 68 |

_Book of My Nights_

Li-Young Lee

No. 69 |

_Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies_

Charles Harper Webb

No. 70 |

_Double Going_

Richard Foerster

No. 71 |

_What He Took_

Wendy Mnookin

No. 72 |

_The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande_

Ray Gonzalez

No. 73 |

_Mules of Love_

Ellen Bass

No. 74 |

_The Guests at the Gate_

Anthony Piccione

No. 75 |

_Dumb Luck_

Sam Hamill

No. 76 |

_Love Song with Motor Vehicles_

Alan Michael Parker

No. 77 |

_Life Watch_

Willis Barnstone

No. 78 |

_The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940–2001_

Louis Simpson

No. 79 |

_Is_

Wayne Dodd

No. 80 |

_Late_

Cecilia Woloch

No. 81 |

_Precipitates_

Debra Kang Dean

No. 82 |

_The Orchard_

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

No. 83 |

_Bright Hunger_

Mark Irwin

No. 84 |

_Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems_

Lola Haskins

No. 85 |

_Curious Conduct_

Jeanne Marie Beaumont

No. 86 |

_Mercy_

Lucille Clifton

No. 87 |

_Model Homes_

Wayne Koestenbaum

No. 88 |

_Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey_

Barton Sutter

No. 89 |

_Angels for the Burning_

David Mura

No. 90 |

_The Rooster's Wife_

Russell Edson

No. 91 |

_American Children_

Jim Simmerman

No. 92 |

_Postcards from the Interior_

Wyn Cooper

No. 93 |

_You & Yours_

Naomi Shihab Nye

No. 94 |

_Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems 1986–2005_

Ray Gonzalez

No. 95 |

_Off-Season in the Promised Land_

Peter Makuck

No. 96 |

_The Hoopoe's Crown_

Jacqueline Osherow

No. 97 |

_Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems_

W. D. Snodgrass

No. 98 |

_Splendor_

Steve Kronen

No. 99 |

_Woman Crossing a Field_

Deena Linett

No. 100 |

_The Burning of Troy_

Richard Foerster

No. 101 |

_Darling Vulgarity_

Michael Waters

No. 102 |

_The Persistence of Objects_

Richard Garcia

No. 103 |

_Slope of the Child Everlasting_

Laurie Kutchins

No. 104 |

_Broken Hallelujahs_

Sean Thomas Dougherty

No. 105 |

_Peeping Tom's Cabin: Comic Verse 1928–2008_

X. J. Kennedy

No. 106 |

_Disclamor_

G.C. Waldrep

No. 107 |

_Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death_

Christopher Kennedy

No. 108 |

_Sleeping with Houdini_

Nin Andrews

No. 109 |

_Nomina_

Karen Volkman

No. 110 |

_The Fortieth Day_

Kazim Ali

No. 111 |

_Elephants & Butterflies_

Alan Michael Parker

No. 112 |

_Voices_

Lucille Clifton

No. 113 |

_The Moon Makes Its Own Plea_

Wendy Mnookin

No. 114 |

_The Heaven-Sent Leaf_

Katy Lederer

No. 115 |

_Struggling Times_

Louis Simpson

No. 116 |

_And_

Michael Blumenthal

No. 117 |

_Carpathia_

Cecilia Woloch

No. 118 |

_Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone_

Matthew Shenoda

No. 119 |

_Sharp Stars_

Sharon Bryan

No. 120 |

_Cool Auditor_

Ray Gonzalez

No. 121 |

_Long Lens: New and Selected Poems_

Peter Makuck

No. 122 |

_Chaos Is the New Calm_

Wyn Cooper

No. 123 |

_Diwata_

Barbara Jane Reyes

No. 124 |

_Burning of the Three Fires_

Jeanne Marie Beaumont

No. 125 |

_Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line_

Sean Thomas Dougherty

No. 126 |

_Your Father on the Train of Ghosts_

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher

No. 127 |

_Ennui Prophet_

Christopher Kennedy

No. 128 |

_Transfer_

Naomi Shihab Nye

No. 129 |

_Gospel Night_

Michael Waters

No. 130 |

_The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home_

Janice N. Harrington

No. 131 |

_Kingdom Animalia_

Aracelis Girmay

No. 132 |

_True Faith_

Ira Sadoff

## _Colophon_

_True Faith_ , poems by Ira Sadoff, is set in Sabon, a digital version of the typeface designed by Jan Tschichold (1902–1974) and loosely based on the work of Claude Garamond and his pupil Jacques Sabon.

The publication of this book is made possible, in part, by the special support of the following individuals:

Anonymous

Anne Germanacos

Suzanne Gouvernet

Robin, Hollon & Casey Hursh,

_in memory of Peter Hursh_

X. J. & Dorothy M. Kennedy

Katherine Lederer

Boo Poulin

Deborah Ronnen & Sherm Levey

Steven O. Russell & Phyllis Rifkin Russell

Sue Stewart,

_in memory of Steven L. Raymond_

Ellen & David Wallack

Michael Waters & Mihaela Moscaliuc

Glenn & Helen William

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook


Posted in TFW's news, video on March 14, 2016 by Foiling Week.
The S9 Project is a designed by Michele Pretucci and the first Prototype was built and test in the summer of 2012 and the good result from the test was used for build the new and one desing Stunt 13.9. The construction of the S.9 was established due to the evolution in sailing competitions and the new tecnology about foil apply to the sport catamarans.
The Michele Petrucci project has landed in the US at Canyon Lake, Texas. Video above shows perfect easy foiling of the first two boats delivered overseas. The italian boat is an excellent little cat, probably the best recreational foiler nowadays.


Happy release day, Doorways to Extra Time!
It's finally here! Happy book birthday to Doorways for Extra Time! If you already preordered it, THANK YOU! If you haven't, the wait is over! Buy it now and download the ebook or have the paperback shipped to you ASAP.
This is what it must be like to have your life flash before your eyes. Everyone I've ever met exists here, and their faces and words pass me by in an instant. But then I begin to see places I've never been, people I've never seen, and hear words I don't understand. Trying to focus on it all at once increases the pressure in my head until I worry my brain might explode out my ears, so I relax and let it pass me by, concentrating only on the moment I want to find.
Everything blurs past faster and faster, and I feel like I'm falling. I think my eyes are open, but everything is black.
Want to look back at the other snippets? Links, then!
This entry was posted in Blog, Books, Doorways to Extra Time, Giveaways, News, Spencer Hill Press, The Dream War Saga, Whatever It Takes on August 27, 2013 by Erica Cameron.
Counting down to release day! 1 day!
I light the candles and the incense, meditate while chanting foreign-sounding words, and lie down on my bed, concentrating on the exact time I want to go back to. I pour all my energy into that thought and the image of a clock stuck at exactly 10:05 PM on Friday, October 19th. Keeping that image in my head, I close my eyes and focus.
Time isn't a line or a circle or any 2-D object, Aisling had written. It's more like you're standing inside of a sphere of constantly flowing energy. When you find that center, you can reach out and touch any part of your life.
I imagine a ball of bluish-white light. I concentrate solely on that image and hold it in my mind. I do nothing but concentrate.
I wake up the next morning in exactly the same position.
Tomorrow details will go up about my giveaway, but there's still time to enter to win one of five copies on Goodreads! The Dragon Con launch party is a go, but unfortunately I won't be there. Travel arrangements and a place to sleep kind of fell apart. It would have been fun, though! And I know some of my fellow contributors will be there. Track them down if you can!
The updates to thedreamwarsaga.com go up this weekend with a playlist for Sing Sweet Nightingale and character bios from "Whatever it Takes" and I can't wait until people get to read the book! So exciting!
This entry was posted in Blog, Books, Doorways to Extra Time, Giveaways, Spencer Hill Press, The Dream War Saga, Whatever It Takes on August 26, 2013 by Erica Cameron.
Counting down to release day! 6 days!
Today, I'm jumping right in to the fun stuff. Snippet number four!
Oh the tricks of time travel! Will Valari be able to make it work? And if she does, will it solve her problems or leave her with more of them?
My first giveaway on my site will happen next week, so make sure you come back to celebrate the release with me! Also, don't forget to check thedreamwarsaga.com later this month for the first extras from the series including a playlist for Sing Sweet Nightingale and character bios from "Whatever it Takes"!
This entry was posted in Blog, Books, Doorways to Extra Time, Giveaways, Spencer Hill Press, The Dream War Saga, Whatever It Takes on August 21, 2013 by Erica Cameron.
Counting down to release day! 8 days!
Just over a week from now, you'll be able to get a copy of Doorways to Extra Time! In case you haven't preordered (and even if you have), enter to win one of five copies on Goodreads! Also, don't forget to check thedreamwarsaga.com later this month for the first extras from the series including a playlist for Sing Sweet Nightingale and character bios from "Whatever it Takes"!
Sometimes dead ends can lead you exactly where you need to go! Will that be the case for my dear Valari, though?
This entry was posted in Blog, Books, Doorways to Extra Time, Giveaways, The Dream War Saga, Whatever It Takes on August 19, 2013 by Erica Cameron.
Guys, for the first time EVER, I held a real book with my name in it somewhere. Words I wrote! In my name!
SEE THAT?! My story is second! SECOND! I mean, fourth if you count the two introductions, but still! That's pretty good placement. Also, I'd like to direct your attention to the page numbers. Yes, I did manage to write a 21 page story and still slap the label "short" on it. According to the word counts for the Hugo Award, "Whatever It Takes" technically qualifies as a novelette. But for the purposes of the anthology, we're still going to call it a short story.
Only 11 days until people will have their own copies of Doorways to Extra Time! Until then, I'm going to hug mine and pet the cover and flip through the pages about a million times.
This entry was posted in Blog, Books, Doorways to Extra Time, News, Personal, Pictures, Publication, Spencer Hill Press, The Dream War Saga, Whatever It Takes on August 16, 2013 by Erica Cameron.
Counting down to release day! 11 days!
Getting closer and closer, everyone! Only 11 days left until Doorways to Extra Time releases and, with it, my story "Whatever it Takes"! Details are still in the works for my personal giveaway program, but… soon! Don't forget, though, there's still time to enter to win one of five copies on Goodreads! Also in the works, a possible appearance at Dragon Con later this month, which would be more than a little epic. I'll let you know once I'm 100% positive I'm going to be there.
Today I'm posting another peek at "Whatever It Takes" and there are still four more to come! These posts will also be cross-posted on thedreamwarsaga.com where, later this month, you'll be able to find a list of songs that remind me of Sing Sweet Nightingale as well as the character bios I mentioned on Wednesday!
This entry was posted in Blog, Books, Doorways to Extra Time, Giveaways, News, Spencer Hill Press, The Dream War Saga, Whatever It Takes on August 16, 2013 by Erica Cameron.
Counting down to release day! 13 days!
My short story "Whatever It Takes" releases in 13 days! That's when the anthology, Doorways to Extra Time, will be available to the big, wide world. August 27th is coming up fast and so is the start of my monthly giveaways! I'll be giving away one copy of the Doorways anthology every month between now and December. Details are still forthcoming, but it will happen soon! Until then, you can enter to win one of five copies on Goodreads!
To celebrate the ever-nearing release, I'll be posting short snippets of my story here. Six total before release day! And, yes, my story is long enough to pull six snippets from without spoiling anything! At the end of the month, I'll also activate the first character bios on thedreamwarsaga.com, the four named characters from "Whatever it Takes." From there, we'll be getting closer and closer to the release of Sing Sweet Nightingale and your first really deep dive into my dreamworld.
For now, though, without further ado, here is snippet number one!
So excited to share this story with everyone! And even more excited to see this book release. That means we're one step closer to celebrating Sing Sweet Nightingale!
This entry was posted in Blog, Books, Doorways to Extra Time, Giveaways, Publication, The Dream War Saga, Whatever It Takes on August 14, 2013 by Erica Cameron.
My short story Whatever It Takes is in this anthology. The story is set within the world of The Dream War Saga, but only tangentially connects to the series itself. A good peek into the Dream War universe, Whatever It Takes is available for pre-order now!
Everyone wishes they could get an extra hour in the day. But what if you could?
What if you had a special device that gave you an extra day every week? You could use it to get ahead at work… unless your boss had it too.
What if you knew a spell that gave you an extra hour every day? You could use it to correct a mistake… or make a new one.
What if you could just stop time? You could accomplish a myriad of wonders… if you only knew how to get time started again.
Time loops and time travel, time apps and time outs, time machines, time merchants, and more can be found passing through these doorways into worlds where time can be spent like money… or where extra time can only be bought at a terrible price.
We'd have to deal with the consequences.
This entry was posted in Blog, Book Covers, Doorways to Extra Time, News, Spencer Hill Press, The Dream War Saga, Whatever It Takes on June 3, 2013 by Erica Cameron.


Have it all when you stay in this comfortable updated condo with quick access to historic Fort Worth Stockyards and Downtown Fort Worth. Make it a perfect affordable vacation or weekend get-away for everyone in the family or a group of friends. The area has something enjoyable to do for everyone. It's so fun being hidden away on beautiful Eagle Mountain Lake in a ground level condo overlooking the water. Open access to boating, fishing and seasonal swimming. Eagle Mountain Marina is just around the corner with pontoon, ski boats, jet ski rentals, rental slips and the Twisted Oar Restaurant. King bed in master and guest bedroom with 2 DBL bunk beds. All rooms have direct t.v. Livingroom/kitchen with all the amenities of home. Fully equipped kitchen has everything you will need to prepare meals. (pots, pans, plates, cutlery, and more.) Livingroom and kitchen are an open concept and is cozy and comfortable with a large flat screen TV and fireplace. Dining room table and recliner loveseat and chair. Along the patio is seating overlooking the water. Bath amenities: hair dryers, basic toiletries and towels.
Lakefront Log Home on 1.5 Gated Acres W/ 130 Sixty Foot Oaks!


text:
The next medical frontier: nano-surgery
by Northeastern University
Associate mechanical and industrial enginnering professor Nader Jalili displays an image of a nanorobot on his office computer. Photo by Craig Bailey.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Engineering professor's nanorobot could be performing non-invasive surgical procedures on patients with tumors within the next decade.
Nader Jalili, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, is working to create a controlled nanorobot that will be capable of performing non-invasive cancer surgery with a degree of precision not possible through existing surgical procedures.
At about the size of a ring box, nanorobots could revolutionize surgical practice within the next five to 10 years by making procedures of all sorts more precise and safer, said Jalili.
"Precision," he said, "is one of the most important aspects of a surgical procedure."
Guided by image-based information, the futuristic mechanical device would rely on a number of motors that move in tiny, exact increments, enabling it to pinpoint the exact location of a tumor or other surgical object.
"While a surgeon's instruments cannot get to within a millimeter of a tumor, we will be able to precisely guide the robot to a location at a sub-nanometer or nanometer resolution, making us able to see things that we could never see before," Jalili said. A nanometer is .000001 millimeters, and a nanotube is 1/1,000th of the thickness of a human hair.
His nanorobots could also be used to take minute skin samples for pathological testing as well as for diagnostic purposes, or to inject medicine or other fluids very precisely into a patient's body in order to destroy a tumor.
Jalili is currently designing motion algorithms and preparing to test his nanorobots for different tasks.
Nanorobots are made up of sensors and actuators derived from special nanomaterials, such as synthetic zinc oxide, quartz and gold, which have unique features in the nanoscale.
Applying mechanical force to these nanomaterials produces electrical energy, turning some into sensors that track motion, movement and direction, and others into actuators that convert electrical energy into mechanical motion, to move parts such as a nanorobot's gripper.
Effective nanorobots would not put surgeons out of work, said Jalili. Rather, they would take on supervisory roles in the operating room. He likened the role of a surgeon who works with a nanorobot to that of a pilot who puts his plane on cruise control.
"You don't want to go to sleep when you're in cruise control," he said. "Surgeons will follow the procedure and will be supervisors in case something goes wrong."
Jalili's research has been backed by a five-year, $400,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. He also won a $350,000 NSF instrumentation grant to purchase a laser-based micro-system analyzer to view and measure nano-objects—and other materials—in the nanoscale.
Miniature robot for precise positioning and targeting in neurosurgery wins award
Provided by Northeastern University
Citation: The next medical frontier: nano-surgery (2009, December 21) retrieved 21 January 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2009-12-medical-frontier-nano-surgery.html
Calculate the R0 value from basic infection Data
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


PIERRE, S.D. (AP) - South Dakota Health Department officials say it's time for people to start using insect repellant and take other steps to avoid being infected by the West Nile virus.
State epidemiologist Lon Kightlinger says West Nile virus can be serious and even fatal, but people can reduce the risk by taking some simple precautions.
Kightlinger says people should use mosquito repellants and wear clothing that limits exposure to mosquitoes carrying the virus. He says people also should limit the time they spend outdoors from dusk to midnight, the time when mosquitoes carrying the virus are most active.
Kightlinger also says people should get rid of standing water that gives mosquitoes a place to breed.
Since 2002, South Dakota has reported more than 2,000 cases of West Nile virus, including 29 deaths.


text:
Settlements Near for Victims of 2003 Great White Nightclub Fire
January 8th, 2010 by Daniel Kreps Leave a reply »
Photo: McFadd/Getty
Nearly seven years after a fire at Rhode Island's the Station venue killed 100 people during a Great White concert, a federal judge yesterday approved a plan to start issuing over 300 settlements to the victims and their families, the Providence Journal reports. The plaintiffs in the case will reportedly begin to receive money from the $176 million settlement fund in a matter of months, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux said.
The court also approved a report that declared how much each plaintiff will be allocated from the settlements, with those who received the worst burns getting a higher settlement from the fund. Once all the papers are signed, some defendants will have 30 days to pay while others will get 90 days, the Providence Journal writes. "I think this is a red-letter day for the Station fire case," Lagueux said from his bench. "We're on our way. This is a matter that will live 'til death do us part." Lagueux also commended lawyers for their ability to work out a settlement with such a large number of plaintiffs.
During the Great White concert on February 20th, 2003, the band's tour manager Daniel Biechele ignited a pyrotechnic display, and the sparks inflamed the venue's soundproofing foam. The flames quickly engulfed the venue and a stampede for the Station's front door ensued. Of the over 460 people in attendance, 100 died, including Great White guitarist Ty Longley. The incident was captured on video by Providence's WPRI, who were at the Station doing a story on nightclub safety. The Station tragedy was the fourth-deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history.
Following the tragedy, Biechele was charged and ultimately pleaded guilty to 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter in February 2006 and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Biechele was lat...
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Make coming and going more inspirational with a U&T steel coat rack, a perfect combination of art & utility. Our original graphic, artfully layered, framed with hand cut steel and hooks. Rugged and durable for that usual pile of coats, bags and then some. Each piece is handmade by our local welder down the street and assembled with our giclee marine lacquered prints in the U&T studio.


text:
Historic Sites of Manitoba: Hobbs Building (290 Stephen Street, Morden)
This two-storey brick building in Morden was erected in 1898 by John A. Hobbs for his pharmacy. The business was later operated by the Pulford Leonard Drug Company, Bruce Hamlyn Drug Company, and Ven Allen, the last of whom sold it, in 1952, to Ivan Ridley. At this point, Ridley moved to new premises.
The second-floor office was occupied by dentist George H. Bray from 1906 to 1949, and later by L. H. Kahane, B. Friesen, Fred Ollinik, and Stan Jenkins in turn. The space was then occupied by a repair shop for musical instruments. There was a barber shop at the back of the building, later occupied by a hair dressing shop.
After Ridley moved out, the building was occupied by a succession of businesses, including Atkins Hardware (1955), Morden Greenhouses (1964), Morden Florists (1972), Wolfe's Florist Shop and Decock Craft Shop. Since 1983, it has been occupied by a pizza restaurant.
Hobbs Building (September 2011)
Source: Gordon Goldsborough
Site Location (lat/long): N49.18980, W98.10026
denoted by symbol on the map above
Memorable Manitobans: James Aaron Hobbs (1863-1932)
290 Stephen Street, Marathon Pizza, Town of Morden.
Page revised: 19 December 2011
This is a collection of historic sites in Manitoba compiled by the Manitoba Historical Society.
Browse lists of:
Museums/Archives | Buildings | Monuments | Cemeteries | Locations | Other
Please note that inclusion in this collection does not mean that a particular site has special status or protection. Some sites are on private property and permission must be secured from the owner prior to visiting.
Site information is provided by the Manitoba Historical Society as a free public service only for non-commercial purposes.
Search Tips | Suggest a Site | FAQ | Acknowledgements
Send inquiries to the MHS Webmaster.


Hand-washing and safe food handling are hallmarks of a conscientious cook who knows what's at stake in a bacteria-laden world.
Those prone to kidney stones should drink more water, reduce salt intake and eat less meat.
Research suggests people saw symptoms worsen after eating meats containing nitrites.
Sarah Chartier chose a vegan lifestyle for a healthier planet, and she feels healthier, too.


text:
McKinsey & Company Home About Us
A collection of stories about our people, our capabilities, our research, and the ever-changing face of our firm.
Back to New at McKinsey Blog
What will it take to build more Black-owned businesses?
McKinsey partner Shelley Stewart is a leader in our Marketing and Sales Practice and co-leads our research on Black lives and livelihoods.
Our People United States
October 15, 2020 COVID-19 is having a disproportionate impact on Black lives and livelihoods, and in the case of Black-owned businesses—which draw some 40 percent of their revenue from sectors that are most vulnerable to the virus—that impact raises concerning implications for the future of Black wealth creation.
Black families in the U.S. possess about a tenth of the wealth white families do. If that wealth gap were closed, $1 to $1.5 trillion in economic output could be created. According to Shelley Stewart, a partner in our Marketing and Sales Practice who co-leads our research on Black wealth creation, increasing Black business ownership would play a key role in doing so.
The median net worth for Black business owners, Shelley explains, is about 12 times that of Black non-business owners. And if all minorities owned businesses in proportion to their share of the labor force, we would see up to one million new businesses, nine million jobs, and $300 billion in worker income added to the U.S. economy.
Shelley explained how that might happen—and why it hasn't already—in a keynote presentation at accelerateHER during London Tech Week, an event that drew some 20,000 virtual attendees across 11 days. Immediately following his keynote, Shelley then co-convened a virtual roundtable alongside five other McKinsey leaders to brainstorm actions and initiatives that businesses, government, and investors could individually and collectively take to help address this issue. After the event, we caught up with him to learn more.
Is this just a matter of inspiring more Black entrepreneurs?
It's about so much more than that. Twenty percent of Black Americans are starting or running new businesses right now—more than any other ethnic group. But only four percent of Black Americans run businesses that are older than three-and-a-half years. And the average Black-employer business earns only $858,000 in annual revenues; their white-employer counterparts earn $2.4 million.
In addition, an analysis of nearly 10,000 founders and 135 of the most active venture capital firms in the world found that less than one percent of VC-backed founders are Black. This—again—is despite a nearly 20 percent rate of entrepreneurial activity by Black founders versus 12 percent of white founders.
What are some of the factors that limit opportunities for Black-owned businesses?
First, there's the legacy of historical forces that have created a vicious cycle of persistent and systematic differences in opportunity for Black people in the United States. Black people have been ignored by markets, excluded and distrusted in society, and subjected to numerous structural barriers, including unfair rules and policies that have prevented their rise.
Twenty percent of Black Americans are starting or running new businesses right now—more than any other ethnic group.
Beyond that, this is very clearly an issue of a lack of representation among decision makers in the institutions that are deploying capital and among people who design processes that allocate capital. That lack of diversity creates a gap in understanding amid the ecosystem of founders, and it means that, far too often, Black businesses simply don't get funded.
Are organizations aware of that lack of representation?
I think they're aware, which raises a different and more important question—why is this the case? There's enough research out there, including by our firm, that shows diversity of teams and thinking drives greater returns and opportunities to tap new customers and segments. So, I think it likely has to do with the way these institutions source their talent, and how they think about the availability of talent. It's clear that the talent is there—but are we willing to do something different to find it?
How do leading organizations think about talent sources right now?
Even organizations that have a long history of recruiting at a number of contained schools have over time tried to think about expanding the funnel. This includes not only looking more at historically black colleges and universities but also at some of the big state systems of higher education, many of which offer big tuition incentives for top students of color or from disadvantaged communities.
COVID-19: Investing in Black lives and livelihoods
They're also evaluating recruiting processes to ensure they're as free of bias as possible, and they're investing in talent development to ensure these efforts don't end the moment a talented person of color walks in the door. They're working to make sure people who may have unique needs are supported in their career development all along their journey.
What role can government play?
Governments at the federal, state, and local levels have budgets that they can deliberately put to work for Black-owned businesses. They can deploy dollars to support small business investment, and they can also play a role in buying goods and services from Black-owned businesses in their vendor selection and support processes. In government pension funds, they can find diverse fund managers and ensure those people deploy capital among diverse businesses. And finally, government has a role to play as a watchdog. Even among good processes, you may still have bad actors or clusters of bad actors, and governments can help combat bias and discrimination.
How did people react to your keynote presentation on this at London Tech Week?
The thing I've been hearing the most is that people are thankful that we're out there speaking truth to the facts that lay bare these inequalities. There's a lot more work for us to do on the dissemination side, but it's gratifying to hear that this message resonates.
What about the Black Lives Matter movement. Is that spurring change?
I'm hopeful that some of the impacts from this moment will be deployed in a way that is sustainable. I see institutions making a series of commitments, but it's important to make sure that those commitments are sustainable over time, even when public attention is not as focused on this issue.
Finally, what's your personal outlook on the possibility of progress?
I'm optimistic in the sense that we're having a national debate and discussion about a lot of these issues of injustice. We've seen numerous commitments from large corporations, and I've been in executive forums where these issues are being discussed with a new level of urgency and commitment. But change won't happen just because people make commitments. We have to hold ourselves and these institutions accountable for the right metrics and right measurements that indicate real progress.
Three ideas from our first Black Investor Professionals Forum
McKinsey recently held a discussion around increasing diversity within private equity.
New research highlights gap between race and earning power in the US: Meet the authors
McKinsey delivers findings of research into earning potential of black families and role of philanthropy in community. Here's what we learned.
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Complement the Gift of Melitta Coffee with a Melitta Mug!
Enjoy your favorite Melitta coffee from this elegant, Melitta branded ceramic mug.
Red Melitta logo printed on both sides--for a left-handed or right-handed coffee drinker!


SDE's Photobooth was filled with festive cheer this Christmas season when WB. White Insurance's Sarah Hamilton chose us to help capture their holiday memories with our photobooth service. All the 'holly-jolly jubilations' were set in Oshawa & District Shrine Club on Simcoe St. N. in Oshawa on the 20th of December 2013, only inches away from the day that falls once a year, but we at SDE are sure that with the smiles on everyone's faces, that Christmas did indeed come early for everyone involved in photobooth pleasantries. You too can share in their memories with some of the shots shown below.


text:
Community News, News
Beverly Hills Prepares for COVID-19 Outbreak
In the wake of the continued worldwide spread of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID- 19), on March 11 the Beverly Hills Health and Safety Commission held a special meeting to address the local response.
"It's an issue that is extremely important to our entire community," Mayor John Mirisch said to the almost three dozen people at the meeting. "We intend to remain a healthy City."
Now at almost 135,000 COVID-19 cases worldwide and over 5,000 dead from the virus, including Los Angeles County's first fatality this week, the World Health Organization finally declared the outbreak a pandemic.
Last week the state and county both declared a State of Emergency, and while there are just over two dozen confirmed cases now in L.A. County — a number that is expected to dramatically increase — events are being canceled or postponed throughout the region and institutions are closing their doors. The sports world has gone dark and all major performing arts institutions have cancelled upcoming performances.
On March 12, just hours after L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti unveiled a bevy of safety measures designed to curb the spread of COVID-19, including limiting public gatherings at city facilities in excess of 50 people, the happiest place on earth, Disneyland, closed. (More details on page 18-19.)
Most local private schools and universities have closed their classrooms to transition to online instruction and Beverly Hills Unified School District (BHUSD) may follow suit after the district's upcoming Spring Break holiday.
"We are very fortunate that we have a spring break that starts Friday," BHUSD Superintendent Michael Bregy told those in attendance at the March 11 meeting. "We can then properly assess what our next steps will be."
"We are going to be asking our students to take their materials home with them," he added.
Out of an abundance of caution, Mayor Mirisch said the City had begun the process of encouraging social distancing, including postponing certain events, such as the mayor's upcoming planned "Sing- a-long," the City's forthcoming Sunday morning Farmers Markets and its public library.
On March 11, less than 20 hours before the Chamber of Commerce was set to hold its annual event at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Innovate Beverly Hills, its president alerted attendees that the event was being postponed to promote community health. The next day, Executive Director of The Wallis Rachel Fine announced the theatre would be postponing or canceling all programming through the end of the month.
"As a major performing arts center and cultural hub that depends on audience participation, community gatherings, and social events for its survival, The Wallis feels it has a critical responsibility to prioritize the safety and health of its patrons, artists, staff, friends, colleagues, clients, and partners at this time and be proactive in its efforts to prevent the spread of this unpredictable virus," Fine wrote.
On March 11, All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills Rev. Janet Broderick (sister of actor Matthew Broderick) tested posted for the virus. And that same day news broke that Hollywood power couple Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson had tested positive for the Novel Coronavirus.
"Like everyone else, I'm very concerned with what's going on," Beverly Hills Alma Ordaz resident told commissioners at the meeting. "I think it's important that we adapt to our new reality."
"There are a lot of things that we can do right now in terms of mitigation that I just don't see happening in public buildings," added Ordaz, who worked as a medical practice administrator for 30 years.
Building on the efforts of the City's Pandemic Planning Committee, Mayor Mirisch used the meeting to announce the creation of a COVID-19 Advisory Committee to help inform City policy and help prevent the disease from spreading. The City has already eliminated all non-essential work related travel for its 1,000 employees and is actively looking at various forms of telecommuting.
Beverly Hills Fire Chief Chief Greg Barton assured those in attendance at Wednesday's meeting that the City continues to work closely with the Los Angeles County Department Public Health to determine when and if urgent action is required.
"The City is ready to expand its local response … if directed to do so by public health," he said. "On the Fire Department side, we are very prepared."
According to the Department of Public Health, to avoid the virus from spreading, people are urged to practice effective personal hygiene, which includes thoroughly washing hands, in addition to not touching the face and avoiding handshakes and hugs. People are also urged to stay home when sick, even when mildly ill, and prepare today for more extensive social distancing and needing to stay home.
Director of Emergency Management, Resilience and Recovery Pamela Mottice- Muller recommended that people have food, water and supplies on-hand for seven to 14 days.
Primary symptoms include fever, cough, shortness of breath and malaise. Those exhibiting such symptoms are advised to immediately telephone their primary care physician before leaving their residence to seek treatment or testing.
Following an informative presentation on the spread of the disease, Cedars- Sinai Medical Center Special Pathogens Coordinator Jennifer Garland assured the Commission the hospital was prepared to handle patients with the disease and was in fact "many steps ahead of many hospitals in the surrounding communities."
Residents are advised to sign up to receive notifications by visiting beverlyhills.org/emergencynotification or texting BEVHILLS to 888777. For additional information about COVID-19, visit the publichealth.lacounty.gov or cdc.gov. The City of Beverly Hills Office of Emergency Management can be reached by dialing 310-285-1021. In addition, the City has set up a dedicated website at http://www.beverlyhills.org/novelcoronavirus and is currently in the process of setting up a telephone Hotline.
"We do need to come together as a community," stated Commission Chair Daniel Nazarian.


text:
"""
Contact App

This module provides the various views for the contact form.

Classes:
    Contact

Functions:
    n/a

Created on 23 Oct 2013

@author: michael

"""
from django.views import generic as generic_views
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse

class Contact(generic_views.CreateView):
    """Set up the contact form."""

    def get_form_kwargs(self, *args, **kwargs):
        """Fetch the form."""

        kwargs = super(Contact, self).get_form_kwargs(*args, **kwargs)

        if self.request.user.is_authenticated():
            kwargs.update({'user': self.request.user})

        return kwargs

    def get_success_url(self):
        """Set up the sucess url."""

        return reverse('company_info_contact_thanks')

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Police are hunting two thieves who broke into 26 boats at the Grimsby and Cleethorpes Yacht Club, making off with alcohol, tools, clothing and personal items.
An investigation has been launched after yachts moored at the Grimsby and Cleethorpes Yacht Club were targeted by thieves.
The club's CCTV captured images of the two suspects and the police have recovered forensic evidence from the scene.
The Rear Commodore of the club, Pete Broughton said he didn't believe the thieves were after sailing equipment.
"We don't think it is someone particularly connected to sailing as there was equipment available to them, such as hand-held radios, which wasn't taken," he explained.
The thieves stole alcohol, tools, clothing and personal items from the boats.
Broughton, who is also a policeman, said the thefts happened during a programme of security improvements at the club.
The Grimsby and Cleethorpes Yacht Club has already installed extra lighting, improved the fencing and extended the CCTV coverage.
Extra gates along with other measures are also planned.
So far, it hasn't been confirmed how the thieves managed to enter the club.
In a statement, Humberside Police said the boats are believed to have been targeted between 4pm on 14 October and 10.30am on 15 October, 2016.
"Of the reports formally made to police, one gives details of items stolen, those being a bottle of rum and a hip flask. Enquiries are ongoing at this time," said the statement.
Anyone with information – or who saw anyone acting suspiciously in the area – is asked to call 101, quoting crime reference number 2221601.