I saw her last  Saturday

lit her cigarette  foreign  pungent  dark 

introduced myself

she asked me if Id like a drink as she put her silver case away

--   You slumming

--   You really asking me that

--   Icebreaker

--   Gamebreaker

--   Check  Your move Queenie

she eyed me while taking a drag

--   You like games

A player

--   Id like a drink  Spirits  Straight

Your choice

she said something out of the side of her face to the barkeep

he took down a dusty bottle  wiped off its neck cork  poured two neat
fresh glasses

she pushed one to me took the other

--   To strangers and strange

I took it

--   Strangely strange

she kissed my glass with hers  sipped

I sipped bigger

she knew her liquor

I got the next

she got the third

small talk  dark humor  other cigarettes

her evenings end she took my number

I didnt ask for hers

her game

leaving she said shed call

--   Maybe Monday

it was Thursday

I wasnt waiting

maybe I was

I went down to the tobacconist

bought a Hemingway Short Story

walking back I past a ruined shale mound

reminded me of one that a backhoe destroyed on the south end of town

trenched to put in a lighted church marque

church needed to advertise

I pulled chunks of rock out  exposed seashell fossils

paperweights  curios

placed near whalebones skulls cut-crystal decanters Id been meaning to fill

maybe I was waiting

at the foot of the shale I saw two spent cellophanes

rubbers

a broken pint of whisky

its bottom tilted  slivers like canine  a slip of liquor held

two stone knob

she held them

I took her from behind

she doubled back

said I owed her a nightcap

I said a nightcap            or a fuck

off to the side of the road

headlights dappled us

I dug how our shadows danced on the shale face

she had the cellophanes

opened her purse

they laid against her case

strange

maybe I was

I liked it 

                                                                                                                     

1550,  Thursday,  3  12. 15      

Saint Augustine

                            sometimes that cat gets on a roll an theres no stopping him

I like him tho                                           

                       he consistently makes cameos in my head  pushes the tip of my ballpoint pen across scores an scores of unlined pages

 

I cant shake him

he laid this beaut on me down from 415 CE(I know CE would twist his panties hes AD if ever AD was inscribed during the Fifth Century I dont know if the people then recognised BC BCE AD CE E-I-E-I-O hey)

The danger . . . exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man

in the bounds of hell

I gotta admit I gasped had to take a breath

  

I was troubled

 

didnt sound like him

found it cited in a book Upright Thinkers

I stole some encouragement however the translation had the devil begin with a little d spirit s man m and hell came around the bend riding the tail of the caboose sporting a little h

because it was attributed to Augustine I was without any choice but to dig down hit the books not dare take the quote at face value I had to be convinced skeptic that I am that Augustine had written it when so many things he wrote I took solace refuge among an if he wrote something as stupid as what I read I had to utterly see for myself

libraries can inspire or deject
the Chicago Public Library on Michigan is maniacal an I needed a playmate as obsessed as I

several hours in defying niggling librarians who wanted to assist me who were likely the staid spawns of efficiency an catalogues  which I was not  I prefer the choke of settled dust paper mites the aromatic musk of aged long unopened books    because I am sensual I guess

I found a thin article by Catholic mathematician an scholar Jack Perry  he preceded me an was agog as I

he wrote that he found in the text De Genesi ad Litteran II, xvii, 37, Augustines original Latin: Quapropter bono christiano sive mathematici, sive quilibet impie divinantium, maxime dicentes vera, cavendi sunt, ne consortio daemoniorum animan deceptam, pacto quodam societatis irretiant.

which thank gawd he translated: For this reason, the good Christian should beware not only of numerologists, but all those who make impious divinations, above all when they tell the truth. Otherwise, they may deceive the soul, and ensnare her in a pact of friendship with demons(I did not know soul was a she).

Perry decried the use of the Latin mathematici to mean mathematician when it had meant numerologist and defended his translation the passage had to be read in its entirety read in context of the preceding text which specifically aligned the flagrant trolled bullet point or bumper sticker call it what one may with the occult and with astrologers

somewhere someone had swung a corked bat

they slipped in transliteration for translation

an while the Upright Thinkers author may have been neglect or too pummeled to precipitate their authorial due diligence or perhaps wasnt a fan(or devotee) of Augustine by either honest error or cheating the ball had to be pulled back over the fences edge an reclaimed    its homer run an any RBIs disallowed

I have to admit I was relieved

I sat back on my blondewood chair before its stout blondewood table in the dimming preternatural hall a bit prior to the overhead electrical lighting fixtures coming up slipped a flask from my coat pocket an took a sip 

 

I believe I whispered aahh an sipped again

 

I must also admit the nagging I was wont as a kid returned to my bones

the modern high school I attended didnt offer Latin per its curriculum as a foreign language it insisted Latin was dead the sharp volleys that ensued nearly had me dismissed rather bluntly encouraged to attend a Catholic high school in the city which catered to students bent on religion Assholes I inveighed Vulgar Latin and Romantic languages are at the heart of our English language our neoAmerican braying an spittle an slang

                                                                                                                             our thought cherry exceptionalism

      often I wonder what CE Fifth Century Augustine would have said

   

     

0100,  Thursday, 3  12. 15

1302,  Thursday,  3  12. 15