Well, I was half right...

Isn't what is happening to Senator McCain now that he has chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate pretty much tantamount to removing him from the ticket? Same effect, different method...

John McCain will never be the Republican nominee for President.

Throughout the summer his campaign will continue imploding, all the while allowing right wing groups to attack Obama in a manner similar to the Clintons -- Hillary is a lesbian, they murdered Vince Foster, etc. etc. It's already begun.

By the time of the convention, Obama will be beaten up by all of the "he's a crack smoking Muslim terrorist homosexual" stuff, and people will be weary of the wrangle...and of course McCain will be ever more apparently unelectable. Most importantly, the press and public will be bored with it all.

At the Republican Convention, they will "throw McCain under the bus" (or he'll have a convenient "health issue." None of the Repubs like him, they've let him carry water for them for a long time but when they ditch him, what's he going to do, who's going to follow him? Nobody: so there are no consequences for them ditching him.) Then they will draft a young right wing man (I think Jeb Bush because it pushes it over into Crazytown where I live, of course, but some reasonably attractive younger man -- Mitt Romney, etc.) and an older woman...Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Condi Rice, etc.

The media will go nuts. The Republicans will own the story from the convention to the election. There will not be time for the Dems to either 1) develop a strategy to combat the new guy; 2) come up with a better story of their own. The new candidate will not get scrutinized in the same way as ANY of the other candidates thus far and more importantly, he will be NEW.

Obama, who once seemed new, will now seem tired, and the Repubs will win the election.

Traveling With Ray

How much more
it might have meant, a few years ago on a train
passing a row of houses strung along a lakeshore, to
have had you there. Idly chatting, making
the endless hours seem "normal" rather than running away from something, an
accretion of "somethings:" too many people with names and faces and stories
to tell which all become blissfully beside the point on a quick circuit
of our vast Nation, no goal in sight but to obscure the ultimate destination,
back to where I started, of course, the dog chasing, the snake eating the
clichéd tail, like "love" which gets automatically renewed without even
having to stand in line for it, requires no identification, in fact, it's
criminal how easy it is to begin the whole damn thing over again, no matter
how many miles you’ve logged between yourself and the object of your affection.

Which is one way to look at it. Clinging to that the way you cling to
the clear memory of your twenty year-old body as the way you actually look, the ideal
representation of "you, the perfectly designed container
for the person you still want to be, wise and foolish and full of hope, believing
in the way a particular shirt hangs off your shoulders like armor, the
smoke that drifts into the nostrils of your enemies, causing lust and
confusion, just the way you imagined it in the steamed-up bathroom mirror
after your "disco nap." Where did I bury that? Only to find it again
in a succession of premeditated smiles, drowning in admiration for anyone
who somehow seemed to be able to keep certain balls
in the air, with the sense to wait for the opportunity to fall, lightly
without speaking to the unimaginably soft pillows of actual release,
the appropriate music playing without ceasing and ever-changing as
though one had actually spent the time to figure out the cold
technology whereby that happens, can happen without any
sort of magic at all.

So my mind turns to weathered shingles and Provincetown, or your personal row
of white buildings backed by a towering wood. Not so much a person as a path
through some non-local underbrush, an actual timetable, the thrill of being able to mark
the entire future up to account, the realization that no-one believes in me so much as
the Chase Manhattan Mastercard which, thus far, has provided me with all my dreams...
seriously, as if that were the ultimate thing, opening the present
you've bought for yourself and finding it's exactly what you wanted.
"This modern life.” Knowing it all turns upon you. Well, not you, exactly,
but me, if that makes sense, the marginal distinction between me and the parade
of "you," no single one of whom is so distinct as to make me forget myself and the
responsibility which is mine, an indebtedness to the vaguely cruddy world which
spits me out the moment I forget how important it is to remember time,
the kind that counts you out one minute and in the next discovers
there is water on the moon.

Stay

At five a.m. you finally tire of being in pain,
but there's no-one to tell that to, so
you sink back into it, or sleep,
planning to write something to someone
about it in the morning, which comes late.
It's one of those things you have to deal with,
in life, like the man you love moving a thousand
miles away, not seeing him anymore. It's sad,
but not sad enough. You end up having to go on
from there.

I have a snapshot from last summer, of the path
down to the beach. Scrub cedar and sharp grasses wrestling
their way out of the dunes, the same thicket described
by Thoreau, who said: 'you can stand on Cape Cod
and feel all America at your back.' Or something
like that. At the time I completely missed the significance
of where I was standing, overwhelmed instead
by the freckles scattered over someone's shoulders,
the sound of them driving away in my rented red convertible.

Still, love seems to have its own gravity, the simple
fact of being drawn to a particular person revealing
all sorts of truths and equations, given time and
a taste for that sort of thing, a mind which bends
in that direction. The problem is how to bottle it,
I mean, who needs another pathway through
the complexities of love ending, as they all do, at
the sea?

So you try to find some comfort in the order
of a day. The details of coffeemaking, the single
household task, washing the dishes, assigned to the
hours between twelve and one. Things that make
you "feel good" about the person you're supposed to be.
Peering through your own smudged windows at the warmth
and light inside thinking "look, he's making coffee, he's
washing the dishes, he's sitting down to work." Longing,
somehow, for your "real" life to look that way.

Which, of course, it does for a while. Everything prepared
for the moment when all the hoped-for guests
arrive to celebrate nothing that you've done, but what you
tried to do. I've wanted to explain this to you for quite
some time. The desire to inhabit the past as a way
of warding off the future, which is uncertain, though
possibly beautiful, just possibly as golden as remembered skin,
with the sand clinging to it.

Maybe it all adds up to pretending, the imagined hands
that draw you back from the edge of the cliff when
the wind rises unexpectedly, convincing you
you can rest on its warm breath, float softly, unharmed
to the fertile valley below. Or the picture someone
gave you when you parted, captioned "Stay."
As if that was what was necessary. And, ignoring the
obvious irony, believing that it was.

Family Newsletter

Why should it come as a surprise? That the days
End up being mostly cliché, endless expanses
Of glaring whiteness waiting hopefully
To be filled with everything you never had, but somehow
Can't have anymore -- even though lately
You've been doing everything "right," or at least
Have remained so motionless
Relative to the rest of the world that your sins
Could only be those of omission.

So why even bother to go through with it?
The bridges all incinerated behind you, the forward path
Uncertain at worst, at best probably more of the same:
Occasional moments of clarity and feeling surrounded
On three sides by slick, black water stretched tight to
A flat horizon.

Still, it's not exactly an occasion for sorrow, is it?
Finding yourself at the end of your own particular world
Is exactly where you wanted to be, here
On this peninsula of dull pain you have finally
Reached the solution to the first half of your life.
You may now go on to the essay question,
Which fortunately for you has always been a snap.

After all, what better place for your ship to finally
Come in than on the very edge of life? Your
vision un-obscured except to landward, where
Row after row of gray hills cradle the morning fog until the sun
Is at its height -- or sometimes even longer, late into the afternoon.
Therefore, you wait, weighing the alternatives:
The golden messenger gliding on winged feet over the water,
Or the dark carriage emerging from the grimy foothills
To bear you unwilling away to destinations all the more
Fearsome for being known -- the cluttered apartment, the bench
Outside the coffee shop, the enduring silence
Of confusion stunned beyond regret.

Little wonder you always turn to the sea, scanning the glassy surface
For signs of life, though keeping an almost too-respectful
Distance, breathless with the image of being drawn
Into that gigantic mirror, disappearing without evidence
Of ever having gotten this far: the almost irresistible
Compulsion of the acrophobic, the second between jumping
And falling where flight is possible, borne up by fictions of
Holidays past -- the lives joined with yours over time and space,
The maple, split by freak lightning, bleeding sweetness
And profit onto the snowy ground.

Our Best Loved Waltzes
(for Jonathan Ceniceroz)

It's possible we have too much
information about the way "life works."
Who would have thought the morning, with
all its potential, would bring a private resolution
(over coffee with friends) to "keep things out,"
as though experience required editing even as it
washed over your skin, some bitchy but necessary obsession
with key lights and camera angles, ideas
about art brought down to the comfortable
level of catering, the legendary hours in
make-up that made Miss Dietrich...well, Miss Dietrich.

Not that I'm not
as sentimental about fearlessness as the next guy,
the beauty of flying brave flags on a promenade
down a dirty street -- a well-laid punch into
the solar plexus of sheer ignorance eliciting tears
of purest admiration but, somehow, no
impulse to join in, turn out the closets for a
stained bed sheet (sprinkled with spring flowers) and
leftover paint to make a banner defining
the moment which, from my place teetering
on the edge of the curb, has already passed, disappeared
in a tornado of paper and colored cellophane.

It's too fragile to believe in for any length of time, which
may be the problem, anyway. Casually bending
over backwards to check the straightness
of the drawn-on seams running down into your
sling-back pumps eventually becomes
a full-time occupation, gets lost in its own particular bitterness--
all the wild joys unshared, grimy from being handled,
put away "for later." Better to sink directly
into the tediously bourgeois than watch your wardrobe
trade its color for a cut that hides what time has taught you, props
up a hollow head on a slim stalk of ivory silk shot through with silver.

Happiness most likely lies elsewhere, under snow, some other
place where no-one else is looking. I'm tempted
to say "life" has no meaning, except that we feel that it does, walking
halfway home down some dangerous avenue clotted with people we
fear are carrying the disease of sadness and regret, marveling
at the slippery maroon plastic furniture in the window of the "Going
Out of Business Sale," injection-molded into coiled promises of endless
nights of hot, Tinsel Town sex on greasy polyester sheets. Climbing
into the popcorn-scented breeze from the "better" part of town, rung to
rung up shiny aluminum ladders forged from the kind and necessary illusions we
maintain about each other and ourselves, slightly above the headlights
of the oncoming taxis, and the rest of the world, now swept by Lotto fever.

Slavs
(for GC)

Some kind of metaphor: the snow
Falling all over everything, the wonderful
Simplicity
Of the stage machinery exposed
Expressing the regenerative purity of winter,
Warm hibernations of feeling, the inevitability of
The snow (standing
On your roof brushing it from your hair, kissing
Your wet eyelashes) falling here on the cold
Edge of the world, your heart
Red as draperies, poppies, painted
Lips (terrible puppetry of politics, parody
Upon parody, eventually extinguishing
The sun) the snow falling all over everything (something
To talk about on the way to
Dinner...Kiev? Moscow?) scenery revolving, revealing
Room upon room, the cold edge
Of the world with the snow
Falling (making some sort of
Peace with the world, the people
In it, what we've done) all over everything, two
Men talking (the distance
Between here and heaven not as far
As it might seem) the fate of the whole
World balanced, the delicate, silver
Tension of conversation, the snow
Falling all over, under the white
Light illuminating lines of experience,
(Pain, suspicion, regret, fear floating like
Snow behind golden eyes) everything
Drawn up into tight
Knots of words (do we become angels, when
This is all over?) love engendering some
Cumulative transformation, our souls and
Bodies woven over time into a
Bright net, flung into the sky (deciding
This is what we can do, we can do
This) from the cold edge of the world
Descending, like the snow
Falling all over everything.