Irresolute Me

I've really backslid on my resolve not to read on-line at work anything other than Les Misérables. Hard to fathom, really, why it didn't get easier to resist New York Magazine, at least. I had a good moment last week, though, at the home page for the New York Review of Books where every single article and "NYR Blog" post was written by a man and the only name of a woman visible was "Emily Dickinson," featured in an article by a man writing about an event he'd read at where the other person reading, also about Emily Dickinson, was also a man. The event was at the New York Botanical Garden which is too distant for me to ever get to, seemingly, as I have never been.

To reach the NYBG: I add another resolution to the suburbs of a sprawling list. Here in the inner city of this list I'm living with the resolutions I've fulfilled. They didn't vanish, no, they don't, with their fulfillment: they get fuller, more lively, all the time more color in their cheeks and vigor in their big strong limbs. Almost they hold me captive except I choose them. Upward mobility: what might have been in the back of a mind making plans to be "better" for its own sake--I declare.

I'll write more manly: I'll say, instead, my fulfilled resolutions are my Praetorian guard and the unfulfilled, Greco to my Roman, nothing but hoi poloi. I've got my core, creaking leather and broze hinges, under command, sandals slapping the cobblestones in tandem with intent to ricochet and cause affright. Unfulfilled resolutions, scratching themselves through their underclothes, sleeping in haylofts and hollow elephants, throwing dice, haunting the doorsteps of celebrity courtesans, trolling shady public colonnades for news, news, news and spitting to the left from superstition: the big To Do, easily dealt with, going nowhere but up to no good.

Or else, or also: I am inside the barricade with my fulfilled resolutions, some of whom are tied to posts and awaiting execution as police spies (a sexual allusion). All together we demand to be perfected.