Historic Flaws by Bianca Stone

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend November 28, 2016   Historic Flaws   Bianca Stone

I am going to the mountains where the alternating universe of autumn descends over you at an erotic squat. Out of that blank and meaningless Play-Doh of my psychic flesh I am moving on. I am a pupil of fading antiquity. Sprawled across the table, in a lament about healthcare and the ineptitude of The System. Nothing burns quite like The System. It comes at you when you ask for help, displaying its super-talons around a clutch of arrows, saying No.   "What deeds could man ever have done if he had not been enveloped in the dust-cloud of the unhistorical?" Nietzsche asks this morning from a small pamphlet on my lap, issued in 1949 in New York City, which I am leaving now, like a wife from her distant husband who will not stop to ask her why she is weeping while she slices apart his silk ties on the floor of the closet.            Copyright © 2016 Bianca Stone. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "This poem came about after reading Nietzsche's eloquent rant against the mental cage of the historical. The poem meditates on the indifference your personal history can have to your needs of the present, the future. It is my farewell poem to New York City." —Bianca Stone   Bianca Stone is the author of Someone Else's Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014). She runs the Ruth Stone Foundation in Vermont and New York City.     Poetry by Stone   Someone Else's Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014)    "Our Bed Is Also Green" by Josh Bell "They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century" by Maureen N. McLane "Our House" by Sophie Cabot Black Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038