The Past and The Poems

May 02, 2025

White women. Latino men. Boomers. Zoomers. Big. Blocky. Groups.

I try not to do that, to turn instead to the individual, the miraculous human who might be an angel or devil (usually both), singularly and obscurely annoying, or a gem, but it’s them, and not a big-blocky-group.

(Mass graves are big block shaped holes, inevitable if we play with blocks for long.)

But a group that I hide in plain sight, or worse, catapult into Abstraction is the Past.

Distracted during lecture preparation today, I did two things. The first: used Grok to make this title slide for a talk about the winding down of the Romantic era–Tchaikovsky and Dvorak, along with some luminaries of the time. I like it.

Grok, please draw Tchaikovsky as an action movie star.

(The talk is rated PG for rude humor and some swashbuckling violence.)

He looks so…real. A person to remember as an uncle or a brother, not a stature, to honor as real, not a Past.

Then I saw this.

My bookshelves seem to whisper and rustle, and the Past is now…people. Human, no longer stone. Them. Us, someday.

Finally, here are two poems for your Friday.

I hope you enjoy.

–Josh

East of Vesuvius

Vesuvius sounds Roman

(I forgot that it was, winding up the mountain out of town)

Legions of trillium gathered to salute the sunset

in a tribute of threes upon threes

on the side of a quiet road, and a few crooked fences that someone had cared about once.

There’s something about the call of the Wood Thrush filtering through the gathering green

wistful for I don’t know what, exactly. (I never do, but that never stops the ache that lives along the old railroad track and the stream that rushes downwards towards yesterday.)

Nothing ever stops.

Not even the ravens, wheeling over the hollow or the sun, sinking lower.

So with a spin and a turn and a crunch I put heel to gravel and then toe to pedal, the modern chariot

leaving the heights

to the empire of the Wind.