it pricks up its ears at the sound
of trains or thunder
its tail flickers like a flame
caught in a doorway of grass
it quickens at the sight of water
and braces for the jab
of a heel or knee in the space
beneath its muscular heart
it stands in the dreaming rain
and steams in the sun, waiting
for the nettle-sting of flies,
the smell of sugar hiding in a hand
Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 9
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week found a lot of poetry bloggers writing about self-definition, belonging, identity, embodiment, and political engagement. It was a rich haul.
like when you try to put the silence back into your imaginary cat
like a boat on a lake in your ear you live with the wind
Johannes S. H. Bjerg, likes/som’er
Still, after all my ambition, I’ll never own a home or publish my novel. Remember in high school, how I’d run wild, chasing girls, climbing trees to query clouds, that sort of thing. Once in Miami, on a dare, I jogged around a city block wearing nothing but Nikes. I may have fallen hard for someone back then, but what do you know in your twenties? Still, I didn’t expect life to fall so short or to be so unlucky in love.
My days are delayed orgasms that will never climax..
I don’t plan rash action. There will be dinner, if I wash dishes and peel potatoes. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I probably won’t write again. Bills pile up, they won’t let me drive now, and I’m busy giving things away.
Risa Denenberg, Not-about-me poem, on the occasion of my 69th Birthday.
as I was going to sleep last night I had a very clear vision of how my mind works. it was a delicate, erector-set-like machine constructed like a bridge over the much vaster body of direct experience. I could hear it humming. “that’s all there is to it?” I remember thinking
Dylan Tweney (untitled post)
Who am I when I am not interacting with someone specific? That quiet watcher who tilts her head in puzzlement. Like a dog: taking interest, but not making up a story to imagine the world into meaning. It is a peaceful place. But lonely. Maybe that is why dogs curl up tightly against each other in musky dens?
Why Leonard presses his skull into mine until I have to distract him with a pig’s ear or a bit of cheese.
This desire than needs an object.
I should have been a dancer.
Ren Powell, March 1, 2019
prayer kneels down
Grant Hackett (untitled)
wind builds a nest
for the passenger you carry without knowing
A fellowship isn’t a residency. My duties are more complicated than that–not only because of financial concerns, but because I feel a general responsibility to be out and about in the city. But like a residency, this time gives me distance and fresh perspective on life at home. I miss so much, but I don’t miss everything. And letting go of those things that I don’t miss will be an important part of returning.
Sandra Beasley, The Road to Cork
The weather can be mercurial. The hills are steep. Strange to become a version of myself that reaches for blue jeans and flats, instead of skirts and heels, and buries herself in warm clothing. But this is a deeply good place, and I am grateful to be here.
The character of the pinko commie dyke, who is sometimes me and other times other women walking through the world, has been speaking to me in a series of poems that muse on contemporary life and the issues and ideas that are important in the world today. In some ways, I think that this series is representative of my work, which is invested in lyricism and also narrative. I also am interested in personae and exploring where the lyrical ‘I’ overlaps with the poet and where it does not. The disjuncture between the lyrical ‘I’ and the poet fascinate me much more today than they did ten years ago.
The Pinko Commie Dyke Kills / an interview with poet Julie R. Enszer (Bekah Steimel’s blog)
Cathy Warner’s newest collection of poetry, Home By Another Road, takes us down the highway of reflection and, whether she is the driver or the passenger, it is a journey that asks all the big questions. Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? What is home?
Warner uses every map she has available to answer these questions, and while on this journey we are fortunate to have an honest narrator at the wheel. While navigating the complicated territory of family, faith, forgiveness, regret, and redemption, Warner clearly understands we all must pay the toll master for the right of passage we call a life, where you cannot know, you never could, what might become/of you or anything you have ever loved.
Carey Taylor, Home By Another Road
No one ever means to cry, no one says, I think I’ll cry now, it’s such a good day for crying cry more she said the ocean needs your tears
the trash on the beach was pink & sparkly
driftwood like a pile of slingshots
her eye is a storm that rages from sea to sea
Erica Goss, Writing at a Non-Writers’ Retreat
One of my favorite moments is a few episodes into Russian Doll where, convinced she is losing it, Natasha Leone’s character, talking with the woman who mostly raised her, utters her safe word for mental health. I found this a nice idea–a single word that would show the people around us that we were in a bad space that required help. I don’t think I’ve every been quite there, but part of my weird anxious brain worries that if I ever were in need of help, I wouldn’t be able to convey the difference between an ordinary kind of brain wonkiness and something that bordered on dangerous. And truthfully, the weekend I sat down to watch this show the first time, I was in a weirder place. I made it through one episode and it made me so undeniably anxious that I had to stop. I went back the following week, and was glad I did, because it was so, so good.
Kristy Bowen, russian doll
And really, there was something so similar about the characters repeating groundhog day experiences and life pretty much–days spent doing mostly the same things with variations. This is probably why I found it initially super anxiety-provoking, the routine and the missteps that could lead to disaster. How each choice sets off a chain reaction of other choices. If you change A, the B happens, avoid B then you skip C and move ahead to D. It makes every choice unbearable sometimes thinking 10 steps ahead of everything. And I guess, welcome to my brain. And particularly, my brain on winter.
Where I grew up there was a mill at the bottom of the street and a farm at the top. A quarter of a mile up the road were acres of municipal park woodlands. Beyond that, an open-cast valley, more woodlands, brickworks, some working pits. In the valley where I live now, not far away from where I was born, is polluted river, a canal, a railway (think : The Rainbow). There are defunct mills,a defunct marshalling yard. No one can build on the field beyond my back garden because it has pitshafts in it. There’s an even older pitshaft under my neighbour’s house. And so on. Everything formerly ‘organic’ has been managed, enclosed, changed, even the river itself. I live on the edge of a coalfield where the 19thcentury houses are on the boundary between stone and brick. My horizon is the skyline of high moorland from Holme Moss to Oxenhope. This is the lens through which I read the poems of Remains of Elmet, through which I imagine the landscape of the Wodo’s wanderings, the corroded dystopian landscape of Crow, and through which I see foxes, thrushes, pike, hawks.
John Foggin, Critics, poets and the common reader (Part Two)
I inhabit this place. Like a bat in a cave.
James Lee Jobe, ‘From here you can see the snowy mountains’
Like an owl in an elm. This place is my own.
I fill this land like a ghost fills a haunted house,
Like coffee fills a cup.
Starting out from here
Any direction is the right direction,
And turning about from any direction
Takes me back home.
I ate too much salt.
I listened to a podcast about a mystery person who turned out to be Sonia Sotomayor.
A flawed translation turned me into a lawyer.
Sarah J. Sloat, Tuesday minutiae
In response to my last post, friend David Graham wrote, “I’ve finally come to believe that ‘voice’ is not something to concern myself with. Others will or will not tag me with such a thing, but it just messes me up to think about it. I simply (ha! it ain’t simple!) try to write as well as I can & in the process figure out what I want to say (which for me always happens in the revision process, not before.)…In a similar way, worrying about originality is for me mostly a dead end. I love something Levertov said: ‘Originality is nothing else but the deepest honesty.’”
I thought about that for a while, and replied, “I wonder if it’s not the author that has a voice but the poems themselves. I know I get annoyed when a poem of mine starts having a kind of woff woff self-aggrandizing tone of some British lord or Oxford don. I have to shove it off its high horse. Then other poems just think they’re so damn funny they start laughing at themselves so hard I can’t understand what they’re saying.”
And soon after that exchange I found this notion by Richard Russo in the eponymous essay of his new book The Destiny Thief: “I’d been told before that writers had to have two identities, their real-life one…as well as another, who they become when they sit down to write. This second identity, I now saw, was fluid, as changeable as the weather, as unfixed as our emotions. As readers, we naturally expect novels to introduce us to a new cast of characters and dramatic events, but could it also be that the writer has to reinvent himself for the purpose of telling each new story?”
Marilyn McCabe, Mi, a name I call myself; or, More on Voice
Invisible damp fingers
Charlotte Hamrick, Morning Meditation: Fog
leave prints on my skin,
out of sight, muffled roars –
uncertainty circles in a waltz.
Anticipation feels different from expectation, though the two are related. For me, at least, the connotation of the first is more open-ended. Anything can happen, though let’s hope what happens is good. Expectation seems more results-oriented. I am not a results-oriented gardener; I like surprises, I appreciate the education I get even from failures.
Come to think of it, I could describe myself that way as a writer or poet, too: not results-oriented, more intrigued by the things I learn when I work at the writing.
Ann E. Michael, Anticipation
imagine the newspaper you read every day
I will be the article you clip & never throw awaynow do you smell the slow spring coming?
the grass humid with the buzz of dragonfliesan airplane’s drone reaches the rec yard
it’ll land somewhere in a few minuteswe will still be here
James Brush, Air Mail
imagining birds & sky & other lives
My mom had a couple of stories about my early childhood — one was that I didn’t walk until I was 13 months old. “I thought you were retarded,” she liked to say.
Another story was that I wouldn’t color in my coloring book until I figured out, at age three, how to do it perfectly, without going outside the lines.
I never had a spanking until I was three — around the time my next younger sister was born. “You never needed one until then,” Mom used to say.
So here I am, 59 years later, trying once again to finish a novel…and going back to the beginning, over and over, day after day, and trying to make it perfect.
Bethany Reid, What I’m Reading Now
These days, my thoughts return to the situation of our physical bodies quite often. I have friends with very rare conditions: one friend has kidneys that make cysts and another friend has a body that creates non-cancerous brain tumors. Most of my friends are solidly in the land of middle age or older, so there’s vast terrains of discoveries–not unlike adolescence, but without some of the fun discoveries about what bodies can do. Or maybe the fun discoveries are yet to come.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Poet in the Body
Or maybe as we age, the fun discoveries don’t revolve around our bodies but our spirits.
I’m still thinking about whether or not I could weave any of this into a poem that wouldn’t be trite or cover ground that’s well covered by past poets. I joke about being rather medieval in my view of the body, that we’re holy spirits trapped in a prison of flesh; some days I’m joking, but other days I feel that way. It’s a troubling theology, but it’s also pernicious and hard to root out of my consciousness.
“Protest Poetry” also carries my college’s “experiential learning” designation, which means the students are creating a couple of public-facing projects. The first, a collaborative venture, happened this Wednesday. We began planning it a few weeks ago, after a tour of the Rockbridge Area Relief Association as well as reading poems about hunger on the Split this Rock database. The assignment was (for very low stakes, grade-wise) to raise money for RARA through poetry. I told them a benefit reading would work–I’ve organized them before–but it was up to them. We toyed with the idea of a Haiku Booth or poetry-related crafts, but decided on an hourlong event that would be organized, promoted, and emceed by students in the class. They chose and booked a campus space, issued invitations to the readers, created fliers, set up sound equipment, decided the flow of the event, and brought refreshments (I acquired a small budget for the latter).
My undergraduates also did some extra work I did NOT expect or require, because, I think, they became genuinely invested in the cause. Some of them made another trip to the food pantry with questions for the clientele, cleared in advance by RARA staff, such as “What’s your favorite meal?” and “If you had to describe RARA in one word, what would it be?” They constructed poems out of the answers, performing them at the event as well as interspersing information between the poems about RARA’s work. They also set up a fundraising table for three days in the Commons, where they offered soft drinks and home-baked treats. Talking to unsuspecting muffin-eaters about how much food RARA can buy for a dollar, they then sweetly solicited donations in any amount. All told, they raised $470!
Lesley Wheeler, Teaching poetry activism
Home, for Syrians exiled by war, is gone, irretrievable, a lost paradise just as it is, at the same time, a place forever unattainable and mythic. Listening to concerts this week by Kinan Azmeh, the Syrian clarinetist and composer, I was reminded of the mystical desire of Arabic love poetry. The object is unattainable. The wonderful paradox is that in evoking absence, art walked right in and created presence.
Azmeh’s music, presented by Community MusicWorks at local centers, evokes wistful longing with sighs, bends, microtonal wavering and high solemnity of Arab string exhortations — and Kinan’s clarinet wrangles with clarity and fading memory. The feeling is raw, open and shared. Mohammed al Shawaf, a recent immigrant, jumped up spontaneously to read his own poem gathering at Dorcas Institute, a resettlement organization. I scrawled down some of the lines as Kinan translated it into English. It’s about a nightingale who was encountering a displaced poet (apologies for the scrappy transcription!).
“Nightingale, I saw your sad face from the East…Are you a refugee like me? How did you leave heaven on earth? Everything is different, everything destroyed. Did you bring anything from home? You have awoken my feeling…. I promised you, Damascus, I would never forget you.”
Jill Pearlman, Love, Our Inalienable Right
I also read three books of poetry in the past month. all this can be yours by Isobel O’Hare is a powerful collection of erasures from the celebrity sexual assault apologies. The poems are fierce explorations of how the men making these apologies try to evade their own culpability.
The chapbook Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned by Sara Ryan (Pork Belly Press) delves into the liminal space between living and dead, with this collection of poems about taxidermy. The nature of body is explored down to the bone, with footnotes that provide an expanded philosophical look at the art of preservation.
House of Mystery by Courtney Bates-Hardy draws on the dark undertones of fairy tales, providing a haunting look into the role of women in those stories.
Andrea Blythe, Culture Consumption: February 2019
The ceiling is low today. Clouds drift
through the window, grackles pick daintily
the last berries from frozen vines.
She can forgive winterfor its long oddity, its tired body
Romana Iorga, Spring Inspection
of a shrunken old woman. Vines spring
through her couch. A day comes when she must
do something, or simply lie there and bloom.
Colony
In every town, a public square and monuments
whitened in patches by lime and bird droppings;
streets and bridges named after those who came
in galleons. They banished to the outskirts
shamans and native priestesses, then pressed
plow and yoke onto the farmers' backs. Next
came the building of churches and cathedrals,
fantasy of fountains and pulpits painted over
with clouds of putti and gold. An altar boy
would set the censer into its little dialectic
swing: forward and back, curling clouds
of incense smoke until it came to rest again.
The walls, it's said, were set with agramasa---
a paste of mortar: powdered brick, sand, ground
husks, the whites of hundreds and hundreds of eggs.
The oldest of these still stand, down to their bell
towers: crumbling like sugar paste, but somehow
made almost desirable in their surrender to time.
The footnotes we write, the margin notes, will say
we come to hate and love what history has made of us.
Scenarios
If you surrender your passport
to the guard, it's hard to tell
if you'll get it back; or
get it back at all.
If you forget your water bottle
at the airport terminal, there won't
be any place to get mineral water
in the countryside for miles.
If someone yells fire or active
shooter, in one case there may be time
to jump through a window, text a message;
play dead on the floor, trying to survive.
Umwelt
(Lord’s day). My wife up between three and four of the clock in the morning to dress herself, and I about five, and were all ready to take coach, she and I and Mercer, a little past five, but, to our trouble, the coach did not come till six. Then with our coach of four horses I hire on purpose, and Leshmore to ride by, we through the City to Branford and so to Windsor, Captain Ferrers overtaking us at Kensington, being to go with us, and here drank, and so through, making no stay, to Cranborne, about eleven o’clock, and found my Lord and the ladies at a sermon in the house; which being ended we to them, and all the company glad to see us, and mighty merry to dinner. Here was my Lord, and Lord Hinchingbroke, and Mr. Sidney, Sir Charles Herbert, and Mr. Carteret, my Lady Carteret, my Lady Jemimah, and Lady Slaning. After dinner to talk to and again, and then to walke in the Parke, my Lord and I alone, talking upon these heads; first, he has left his business of the prizes as well as is possible for him, having cleared himself before the Commissioners by the King’s commands, so that nothing or little is to be feared from that point, he goes fully assured, he tells me, of the King’s favour. That upon occasion I may know, I desired to know, his friends I may trust to, he tells me, but that he is not yet in England, but continues this summer in Ireland, my Lord Orrery is his father almost in affection.
He tells me my Lord of Suffolke, Lord Arlington, Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Treasurer, Mr. Atturny Montagu, Sir Thomas Clifford in the House of Commons, Sir G. Carteret, and some others I cannot presently remember, are friends that I may rely on for him.
He tells me my Lord Chancellor seems his very good friend, but doubts that he may not think him so much a servant of the Duke of Yorke’s as he would have him, and indeed my Lord tells me he hath lately made it his business to be seen studious of the King’s favour, and not of the Duke’s, and by the King will stand or fall, for factions there are, as he tells me, and God knows how high they may come.
The Duke of Albemarle’s post is so great, having had the name of bringing in the King, that he is like to stand, or, if it were not for him, God knows in what troubles we might be from some private faction, if an army could be got into another hand, which God forbid!
It is believed that though Mr. Coventry be in appearance so great against the Chancellor, yet that there is a good understanding between the Duke and him.
He dreads the issue of this year, and fears there will be some very great revolutions before his coming back again.
He doubts it is needful for him to have a pardon for his last year’s actions, all which he did without commission, and at most but the King’s private single word for that of Bergen; but he dares not ask it at this time, lest it should make them think that there is something more in it than yet they know; and if it should be denied, it would be of very ill consequence.
He says also, if it should in Parliament be enquired into the selling of Dunkirke (though the Chancellor was the man that would have it sold to France, saying the King of Spayne had no money to give for it); yet he will be found to have been the greatest adviser of it; which he is a little apprehensive may be called upon this Parliament.
He told me it would not be necessary for him to tell me his debts, because he thinks I know them so well.
He tells me, that for the match propounded of Mrs. Mallett for my Lord Hinchingbroke, it hath been lately off, and now her friends bring it on again, and an overture hath been made to him by a servant of hers, to compass the thing without consent of friends, she herself having a respect to my Lord’s family, but my Lord will not listen to it but in a way of honour.
The Duke hath for this weeke or two been very kind to him, more than lately; and so others, which he thinks is a good sign of faire weather again.
He says the Archbishopp of Canterbury hath been very kind to him, and hath plainly said to him that he and all the world knows the difference between his judgment and brains and the Duke of Albemarle’s, and then calls my Lady Duchesse the veryest slut and drudge and the foulest worde that can be spoke of a woman almost.
My Lord having walked an houre with me talking thus and going in, and my Lady Carteret not suffering me to go back again to-night, my Lord to walke again with me about some of this and other discourse, and then in a-doors and to talke with all and with my Lady Carteret, and I with the young ladies and gentle men, who played on the guittar, and mighty merry, and anon to supper, and then my Lord going away to write, the young gentlemen to flinging of cushions, and other mad sports; at this late till towards twelve at night, and then being sleepy, I and my wife in a passage-room to bed, and slept not very well because of noise.
four in the morning
and the wind in my head has
a clear affection for factions
and now how high a ringing
like some private god
there between the ears
some great revolution
without a single word
lest it make them think
there is something more
than they know
I listen to the weather
to all the rains that poke
about the door
you who play guitar
go away to write
a passage of noise
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 25 February 1666.
Face It, Her Suffering Makes a Good Story
Sonnenizio with a line from Christina Rossetti
One face looks out from all his canvases, Christina writes.
She’s beauty’s face, he says, the only muse he needs,
the face of his Elizabeth, her wild yet delicate solemnity.
Not often shown full-face, her long, pale profile
faces beyond the painting’s frame, her red mane flares.
She looks remote, mysterious, surely faced poverty
before her face became her entrée to the Brotherhood
and faces even in this new life illness and addiction.
Painter and poet, not merely the model, memorable face
of Dante’s visions, Lizzie will meet the face of death –
their stillborn child – then face her own (an overdose…)
He can’t face life without her, casts his manuscript
into her grave but then repents, exhumes her rotting face
which follows him, now facing sorrow, guilt, disgrace.
Inspired by Luisa’s recent sonnenizios on Donne and Hopkins, this takes a line from In An Artist’s Studio by Christina Rossetti, thought to be about her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his partner Elizabeth Siddall.
Unself-actualization
All the morning at the office till past three o’clock. At that houre home and eat a bit alone, my wife being gone out. So abroad by coach with Mr. Hill, who staid for me to speake about business, and he and I to Hales’s, where I find my wife and her woman, and Pierce and Knipp, and there sung and was mighty merry, and I joyed myself in it; but vexed at first to find my wife’s picture not so like as I expected; but it was only his having finished one part, and not another, of the face; but, before I went, I was satisfied it will be an excellent picture. Here we had ale and cakes and mighty merry, and sung my song, which she [Knipp] now sings bravely, and makes me proud of myself.
Thence left my wife to go home with Mrs. Pierce, while I home to the office, and there pretty late, and to bed, after fitting myself for to-morrow’s journey.
alone abroad
I find my unself
find my if picture
like another face
I will make my go home
fit my tomorrow journey
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 24 February 1666.
Suerte Suerte
Did you know
you were pulot only,
picked up from the stoop
or from the fork of a tree,
out of the dumpster in
the alley, your face
scrunched up like a piece
of champoy, salted plum
candy? And did you know
your wrapper was stiff yellow
though you didn't freeze
overnight in the wind
or get eaten by wild dogs?
Lucky lucky, said the nuns
looking into the milk
carton and finding you under a pile
of rags. Suerte suerte lang---
If not for the trash
collector, if not for scissors-
grinder rapping at the gate,
if not for the maid who took
you into the kitchen where she fed you
the pap skimmed off the top
of a pot of boiling rice.
Limits to growth
Up betimes, and out of doors by 6 of the clock, and walked (W. Howe with me) to my Lord Sandwich’s, who did lie the last night at his house in Lincoln’s Inne Fields. It being fine walking in the morning, and the streets full of people again. There I staid, and the house full of people come to take leave of my Lord, who this day goes out of towne upon his embassy towards Spayne. And I was glad to find Sir W. Coventry to come, though I know it is only a piece of courtshipp. I had much discourse with my Lord, he telling me how fully he leaves the King his friend and the large discourse he had with him the other day, and how he desired to have the business of the prizes examined before he went, and that he yielded to it, and it is done as far as it concerns himself to the full, and the Lords Commissioners for prizes did reprehend all the informers in what related to his Lordship, which I am glad of in many respects. But we could not make an end of discourse, so I promised to waite upon [him] on Sunday at Cranborne, and took leave and away hence to Mr. Hales’s with Mr. Hill and two of the Houblons, who come thither to speak with me, and saw my wife’s picture, which pleases me well, but Mr. Hill’s picture never a whit so well as it did before it was finished, which troubled me, and I begin to doubt the picture of my Lady Peters my wife takes her posture from, and which is an excellent picture, is not of his making, it is so master-like.
I set them down at the ‘Change and I home to the office, and at noon dined at home and to the office again. Anon comes Mrs. Knipp to see my wife, who is gone out, so I fain to entertain her, and took her out by coach to look my wife at Mrs. Pierce’s and Unthanke’s, but find her not. So back again, and then my wife comes home, having been buying of things, and at home I spent all the night talking with this baggage, and teaching her my song of “Beauty retire,” which she sings and makes go most rarely, and a very fine song it seems to be. She also entertained me with repeating many of her own and others’ parts of the play-house, which she do most excellently; and tells me the whole practices of the play-house and players, and is in every respect most excellent company. So I supped, and was merry at home all the evening, and the rather it being my birthday, 33 years, for which God be praised that I am in so good a condition of healthe and estate, and every thing else as I am, beyond expectation, in all. So she to Mrs. Turner’s to lie, and we to bed. Mightily pleased to find myself in condition to have these people come about me and to be able to entertain them, and have the pleasure of their qualities, than which no man can have more in the world.
out of doors and fields
the streets full of full people
out of leaves to speak with
and hills to take posture from
out of parts for God
out of world
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 23 February 1666.
Unselfie
Up, and to the office, where sat all the morning. At noon home to dinner and thence by coach with my wife for ayre principally for her. I alone stopped at Hales’s and there mightily am pleased with my wife’s picture that is begun there, and with Mr. Hill’s, though I must [owne] I am not more pleased with it now the face is finished than I was when I saw it the second time of sitting. Thence to my Lord Sandwich’s, but he not within, but goes to-morrow. My wife to Mrs. Hunt’s, who is lately come to towne and grown mighty fat. I called her there, and so home and late at the office, and so home to supper and to bed. We are much troubled that the sicknesse in general (the town being so full of people) should be but three, and yet of the particular disease of the plague there should be ten encrease.
if I am my picture
I am no more
no face is finished
my own grown fat and home
to the general tow of people
and yet part sea
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 22 February 1666.