Abelia x grandiflora "Little Richard"
"I'm like a one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store."
—Jesse Stone, "Shake, Rattle and Roll" (1954)
"What are you going to do today?"
I ask Muggs when she comes to me this morning.
"Not much," she replies,
flexing her butterscotch paw, and sits there purring on the bed.
I put the words into her mouth, of course.
(She has no teeth and cannot bite.)
But not much is, indeed, what we plan to do.
Today is everything that is the world.
Nothing we might do can change that.
The Little Richard abelia at the door is in full bloom.
No bees though—
although in years gone by it was alive with them.
"The world is everything that befalls."*
" . . . and everything we know that is not just noisy bluster can be said in three words."†
*Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), 1: "Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist."
†Ibid., epigraph, from Ferdinand Kürnberger: ". . . und alles, was man weiss, nicht bloss rauschen und brausen gehört hat, lässt sich in drei Worten sagen."
June 17, 2024
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