14 June 2006

Jasmine Bailey, a remembrance

Inspired by my fellow schoolmate's blog I feel I must go on. Jasmine Bailey (pictured left) is no poetaster; rather, she is a fine intellect, a worthy member of any literary coterie but ultimately a hard-working poet and writer. She played hotdice once. This is all I remember.

But getting back to me, me being the focus of the vanity project that this is, I was inspired by Jasmine's blog to write more, and more cogently in mine. She appears to be stationed to teach English in the pampas of Argentina: How cool is that? And she keeps a blog and posts poetry. Awesome. So I will go on. I'm right now compiling a list of Wittgenstein scholars: If anyone has any leads on great Wittgenstein Ph.D. programs, let me know. There is this intriguing "Wittgenstein Studies" MA. I don't know how reputable the program is, though.



Poem 1 for Diego Maradona by Jasmine Bailey

I hope I never see you dead,
your neck is mercifully thick,
jowls, your hair to drain the sun
a thousand years, if you were
any smaller beholding you
would hurt, the idea and the man,
excess is at home in you, can dance
in arcs broad as the human body
can protract, a geology like a waterfall.
Sleek as a Milonga, your career
was brief the way we picture time,
the lease of soccer's genius short,
the number of times a quadricep
contracts is an integer, like blinks
and breaths and nights you spend
in an Italian woman's arms
but greatness has no digit
or calibration mercurial or otherwise.

Tell me who finds you plain,
staggering out of rehab, glimmering
with accusations, fathering a generation,
genetics and the beautiful game,
the flag, your shirt, the mate that
you sip, what was born here only to
transcend its sphere, that as much
as any plains or rhyming words
is what we want to be and are.