Eric M. Murphy

@ericmmurphy

Birds, Math, Literature, & Airpower. BoD Member @Strategy_Bridge, #Strategy, #Development, #NationalSecurity, #MilitaryAffairs. Repost is not endorsement. Nothing interesting to say.

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Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 16d

Finished Season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again. (Yes, I’m late. I had a job and such.) Jesus. I don’t want to offer a review right now, but it speaks to where we are now.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 16d

“Goose” Richard Emil Braun www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richar...

Trailing her father, bearing his hand axe,
the girl thought she had never
guessed what earthly majesty
was before

then, as he strode unconcernedly
holding a vicious gander
by the horny mitts and let
the big wings

batter his knees. She was also surprised
to feel a liberating
satisfaction in the coming
bloodshed, and

that notwithstanding all the times she had
been beleaguered and
had fled, today she did not fear
the barnyard hubub.

Yet, as her father’s clever stroke fell, as
the pronged head skipped sideways
and the neck plumes stiffened with blood
from the cleft,

she was angry; and, when the headless goose
ran to the brook and was
carried off into the woods alive,
she rejoiced,

and subsequently frequented those woods
and avoided her father.
When the goose began to mend she
brought him small

hominy, which was welcome though she had
to press the kernels one
by one into the pink neck that
throbbed into

her palm; when haemorrhage occurred she would
not spare handkerchiefs,
and stanching the spot she felt a thrill
of sympathy.

But for the most part there was steady progress,
and growing vigor was
accompanied by restlessness,
and one cool day

the blind thing was batted out of existence
by a motorcycle.
She had no time for tears. She ran
upstairs to miss

her father’s barytone commiseration,
then out onto the fields,
and, holding an old red pinwheel,
ran ran ran ran.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 17d

“Things to Do in New York (City)” Ted Berrigan www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ted-be...

for Peter Schjeldahl

Wake up high up
frame bent & turned on
Moving slowly
& by the numbers
light cigarette
Dress in basic black
& reading a lovely old man’s book:

BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN

change

flashback

play cribbage on the Williamsburg Bridge
watching the boats sail by
the sun, like a monument,
move slowly up the sky
above the bloody rush:

break yr legs & break yr heart
kiss the girls & make them cry
loving the gods & seeing them die

celebrate your own
& everyone else’s birth:

Make friends forever
& go away

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 19d

Meh.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 19d

"A Poem for Speculative Hipsters" --Amiri Baraka www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amiri-...

He had got, finally,
to the forest
of motives. There were no
owls, or hunters. No Connie Chatterleys²
resting beautifully
on their backs, having casually
brought socialism
to England.

Only ideas,
and their opposites.

Like,
he was really
nowhere.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 21d

“The Only Tourist in Havana Tuens His Thoughts Homeward” —Leonard Cohen en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard...

Come, my brothers,
let us govern Canada,
let us find our serious heads,
let us dump asbestos on the White House,
let us make the French talk English,

not only here but everywhere,
let us torture the Senate individually
until they confess,
let us purge the New Party,
let us encourage the dark races
so they'll be lenient
when they take over,
let us make the CBC talk English,
let us all lean in one direction
and float down
to the coast of Florida,
let us have tourism,
let us flirt with the enemy,
let us smelt pig-iron in our back yards,
let us sell snow
to under-developed nations,
(It is true one of our national leaders
was a Roman Catholic?)
let us terrorize Alaska,
let us unite
Church and State,
let us not take it lying down,
let us have two Governor Generals
at the same time,
let us have another official language,
let us determine what it will be,
let us give a Canada Council Fellowship
to the most original suggestion,
let us teach sex in the home
to parents,
let us threaten to join the U.S.A.
and pull out at the last moment,
my brothers, come,
our serious heads are waiting for us somewhere
like Gladstone bags abandoned
after a coup d'état,
let us put them on very quickly,
let us maintain a stony silence
on the St. Lawrence Seaway

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 22d

“The Dreadful Has Already Happened” Mark Strand www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mark-s...

The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly.
They moisten their lips with their tongues. I can feel
them urging me on. I hold the baby in the air.
Heaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun.

A small band is playing old fashioned marches.
My mother is keeping time by stamping her foot.
My father is kissing a woman who keeps waving
to somebody else. There are palm trees.

The hills are spotted with orange flamboyants and tall
billowy clouds move behind them. “Go on, Boy,”
I hear somebody say, “Go on.”
I keep wondering if it will rain.

The sky darkens. There is thunder.
“Break his legs,” says one of my aunts,
“Now give him a kiss.” I do what I’m told.
The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind.

The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh
when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them
out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.
It was about that time I gave up.

Now, when I answer the phone, his lips
are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered
around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search
I find his feet. He is what is left of my life.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 23d

“Haiku” Etheridge Knight www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/etheri...

1
Eastern guard tower
glints in sunset; convicts rest
like lizards on rocks.

2
The piano man
is stingy, at 3 A.M.
his songs drop like plum.

3
Morning sun slants cell.
Drunks stagger like cripple flies
On jailhouse floor.

4
To write a blues song
is to regiment riots
and pluck gems from graves.

5
A bare pecan tree
slips a pencil shadow down
a moonlit snow slope.

6
The falling snow flakes
Cannot blunt the hard aches nor
Match the steel stillness.

7
Under moon shadows
A tall boy flashes knife and
Slices star bright ice.

8
In the August grass
Struck by the last rays of sun
The cracked teacup screams.

9
Making jazz swing in
Seventeen syllables AIN’T
No square poet’s job.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 24d

“Poppies in October” Sylvia Plath www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia...

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly —

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 24d

Who doesn’t love a little Gödel? (Spending a semester learning the tools to prove his incompleteness theorems was a great experience.) I would love to make a philosophy course a foundational aspect of the core—we touch on this, but not deeply. I’d assign this gem. (I kid…a little.)

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 25d

“Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings” Geoffrey Hill www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/geoffr...

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.

Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,
Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;
At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,
With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs
They lie; they lie; secure in the decay
Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,
Before the scouring fires of trial-day
Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,
Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea
Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 28d

"Bedtime Story" George Macbeth www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/george...

Long long ago when the world was a wild place
Planted with bushes and peopled by apes, our
Mission Brigade was at work in the jungle.
Hard by the Congo

Once, when a foraging detail was active
Scouting for green-fly, it came on a grey man, the
Last living man, in the branch of a baobab
Stalking a monkey.

Earlier men had disposed of, for pleasure,
Creatures whose names we scarcely remember—
Zebra, rhinoceros, elephants, wart-hog,
Lion, rats, deer. But

After the wars had extinguished the cities
Only the wild ones were left, half-naked
Near the Equator: and here was the last one,
Starved for a monkey.

By then the Mission Brigade had encountered
Hundreds of such men: and their procedure,
History tells us, was only to feed them:
Find them and feed them;

Those were the orders. And this was the last one.
Nobody knew that he was, but he was. Mud
Caked on his flat grey flanks. He was crouched, half-
armed with a shaved spear

Glinting beneath broad leaves. When their jaws cut
Swathes through the bark and he saw fine teeth shine,
Round eyes roll round and forked arms waver
Huge as the rough trunks

Over his head, he was frightened. Our workers
Marched through the Congo before he was born, but
This was the first time perhaps that he'd seen one.
Staring in hot still

Silence, he crouched there: then jumped. With a long swing
Down from his branch, he had angled his spear too
Quickly, before they could hold him, and hurled it
Hard at the soldier

Leading the detail. How could he know Queen's
Orders were only to help him? The soldier
Winced when the tipped spear pricked him. Unsheathing his
Sting was a reflex.

Later the Queen was informed. There were no more
Men. An impetuous soldier had killed off,
Purely by chance, the penultimate primate.
When she was certain,

Squadrons of workers were fanned through the Congo
Detailed to bring back the man's picked bones to be
Sealed in the archives in amber. I'm quite sure
Nobody found them

After the most industrious search, though.
Where had the bones gone? Over the earth, dear,
Ground by the teeth of the termites, blown by the
Wind, like the dodo's.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· 29d

"Lilies of the Valley" Jon Silkin www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jon-si...

Minute flowers harden. Depend
From thin bowing stem;
Are white as babies' teeth.
With broad leaves, immobile;
Are sheath-like, and fat.
What have these to do with beauty?
They must take you with
A fingering odour, clutches the senses,
Fills the creases and tightens the wind's seams,
As noise does. The plant is equipped.
Even then you don't like it.
Gradually though
Its predatory scent
Betters you, forces you, and more than
The protected rose creating
A sculptured distant adulation
For itself. This insinuates, then grapples you,
Being hungry; not poised, not gerundive.
Hard, and uncrushed, these flowerheads;
Like beads, in your palm.
You cannot destroy that conquering amorousness
Drenches the glands, and starts
The belled memory. Glows there, with odour.
Memorable as the skin
Of a fierce animal.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jul 13

"Ludwig's Death Mask" Ted Hughes www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ted-hu...

Words for his ugly mug his
Naked exhibitions at windows shaking a
Fist at the gapers, his whalish appetite
For cold douches and changing lodgings.

Words for his black-mouth derisive
Engulfing in laughter the sweet-eyed attendance
Of aesthetes spreading their marzipan amazement
Over his music and nibbling it amazedly off.

But no words for the loyal
Formations of angels which attended
All this in misunderstanding and
Despair and finally grimly as Shakespeare

Caused himself flee seventeen feet down
Through the church-floor into dumb earth touched
His ears dead to continue complete
In union with the communion of angels.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jul 7

This is the #USMNT I know and hate, finding all the ways they can to play badly.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jul 6

“Four Poems for Robin” Gary Snyder www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gary-s...

Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest

I slept under rhododendron
All night blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck in my pack
Hands deep in my pockets
Barely able to sleep.
I remembered when we were in school
Sleeping together in a big warm bed
We were the youngest lovers
When we broke up we were still nineteen.
Now our friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.

A spring night in Shokoku-ji

Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.

An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.

December at Yase
You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
“Again someday, maybe ten years.”

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I’ve always known
where you were—
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn’t.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.

And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jul 4

“The Mad Yak” Gregory Corso www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gregor...

I am watching them churn the last milk they'll ever get
from me.
They are waiting for me to die;
They want to make buttons out of my bones.
Where are my sisters and brothers?
That tall monk there, loading my uncle, he has a new cap.
And that idiot student of his—
I never saw that muffler before.
Poor uncle, he lets them load him.
How sad he is, how tired!
I wonder what they'll do with his bones?
And that beautiful tail!
How many shoelaces will they make of that!

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jul 1

I think I’ll change the titles on this little shelf each month. This month, some money things.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 30

Aleksander Čeferin, current UEFA president, can get bent with his thoughts on the expanded World Cup field.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 30

Indeed.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 30

Aleksander Čeferin, current UEFA president, can get bent with his thoughts on the expanded World Cup field.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 28

“Codicil” Derek Walcott www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/derek-...

Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,

tan, burn
to slough off
this live of ocean that's self-love.

To change your language you must change your life.

I cannot right old wrongs.
Waves tire of horizon and return.
Gulls screech with rusty tongues

Above the beached, rotting pirogues,
they were a venomous beaked cloud at Charlotteville.

One I thought love of country was enough,
now, even if I chose, there is no room at the trough.

I watch the best minds rot like dogs
for scraps of flavour.
I am nearing middle
age, burnt skin
peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin,
like Peer Gynt's riddle.

At heart there is nothing, not the dread
of death. I know to many dead.
They're all familiar, all in character,

even how they died. On fire,
the flesh no longer fears that furnace mouth
of earth,

that kiln or ashpit of the sun,
nor this clouding, unclouding sickle moon
withering this beach again like a blank page.

All its indifference is a different rage.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 26

"Hobbes, 1651" John Hollander www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-h...

When I returned at last from Paris hoofbeats pounded
Over the harsh and unrelenting road;
It was cold, the snow high; I was old, and the winter
Sharp, and the dead mid-century sped by
In ominous, blurred streaks as, brutish, the wind moaned
Among black branches. I rode through a kind
Of graceless winter nature, bled of what looked like life.
My vexing horse threw me. If it was not safe
In England yet, or ever, that nowhere beneath the gray
Sky would be much safer seemed very plain.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 26

Apologies for not doing this sooner, Padre. Here are the footnotes.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 23

“The Annihilation of Nothing” Thom Gunn www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thom-g...

Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name
That nightly I rehearsed till led away
To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.

In this a huge contagious absence lay,
More space than space, over the cloud and slime,
Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.

Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,
Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,
And welcomed zero as a paradigm.

But now it breaks—images burst with fire
Into the quiet sphere where I have bided,
Showing the landscape holding yet entire:

The power that I envisaged, that presided
Ultimate in its abstract devastations,
Is merely change, the atoms it divided

Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.
Only an infinite finitude I see
In those peculiar lovely variations.

It is despair that nothing cannot be
Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark
Of dread.
Look upward. Neither firm nor free,

Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 22

“Planetarium” Adrienne Rich www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/adrien...

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind

An eye,

‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 22

Aleksander Čeferin, current UEFA president, can get bent with his thoughts on the expanded World Cup field.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 21

Aleksander Čeferin, current UEFA president, can get bent with his thoughts on the expanded World Cup field.

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 21

“A Morning to Remember” Edward Dorn www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edward...

A Morning to Remember or,
E Pluribus Unum

This is a morning to say something.
This is a really keen morning. All over
the world people are gassing
about one thing or another. The globe
which might easily be taken
for a face, or look, Let’s call it
the head of a successful novelist
grinning thru space, the plots
I think we can assume
just won’t quit. An awful lot
must be happening this morning.

Then there are the little people
inside the Big Novelist, and spinning
on him. They go here and there,
Italy, Spain sometimes but that
doesn’t matter, the Big Novelist
keeps an eye on them. This morning
a lot of people started to talk.
A lot of them had some pretty
nasty things to say. Right! they said
Mr. Barber eats Bisto.

Ian McIan
likes LBJ with manila icing. But no matter
what people say this morning
the Big Novelist will know about it.
Some people say he squints
when those astronauts and cosmonuts
buzz around his head. The Big Novelist
doesn’t like science fiction very much
and if he had fingers, some people think,
he’d pinch them.

(The Adventures, etc. of
Daddy, the little novelist asked
the Big Novelist, can I climb on
your shoulders. No son, Big Novelist said
it’s lonely up here

Eric M. Murphy@ericmmurphy· Jun 18

Soon, I won’t have to read these kinds of books looking for contents for syllabi or enough understanding to be reasonably effective facilitating a seminar. If I ever teach again, Lord, let it be something in which I’m reasonably expert.