Honey in the rock and the sugar don't stop

I did not sleep last night. The sore throat I've been sick with since Friday turned into the kind of cough that does its best to prevent that. I had a doctor's appointment in Medford at nine o'clock, however, so at seven o'clock I crawled out of bed, drank half a carton of orange juice, stood for way too long in the grey cold to catch a bus, made my appointment exactly on time, stood for way too long in the bright cold to catch a bus, read another chapter of Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead (2012), crawled back into bed and promptly passed out: and managed to stay that way until a little before three o'clock, when I think I might have coughed my way awake again. I am not running a fever, however, and so I am still attending the rescheduled Burns Supper tonight with derspatchel and many other fine musical people. I don't know if I'll be able to sing, but there'll be whisky and I can listen. In the meantime, I'm drinking a lot of hot goat's milk and honey and tea.

I'm not sure if it was a nightmare or just the final image of a weird story: I dreamed of Dionysos after the sparagmos, put back together wrong. His skin was stitched together with ivy tendrils, suckers spidering across the fawn-colored jagged flesh; the chewed gaps of the Titans' teeth had been spackled with grape-crushings, pine-tarry staunchings of dry needles and cone-scales pushed into the holes at flank or throat or forearm. There was no blood; it had dried long ago, in grape-juice tricklings. His head was a panther's, pollen-gold and dappled, set sleek on his boy's shoulders, but its eyes were the brown and white glass of a bronze statue. It turned and saw me, blinking softly furred lids. I knew something in there lived and was divine, but I wasn't sure what it was anymore. Breaker of chains, Dionysos who rends the ordinary from the day like the skin from the skull: I hoped I hadn't prayed for him. I had been reading a book, but I can't remember if he was its last page.

In other stories—

1. Three different people sent me the news last night: two new poems of Sappho have been recovered.

2. The testimony of Pete Seeger before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs, August 18, 1955. His life was a contribution.

3. Calling all nineweaving: the complete Ben Jonson is now online.

The dead keep singing, out of rivers, out of deserts, out of long-dry ink and just-stilled strings. I am glad of them.