I’m sorry to disrupt the beauty of this line with a sort of schoolyard thought. . . but milky head definitely seems like it could be an awesome insult. Here, it’s meant to suggest a white-haired old man, maybe with a shade of kindness and compassion and nurturance given milk’s association with motherhood and the milk of human kindness and so on.

But if some kid shouted at me from across the merry go round that I was a milky head, I might be upset. I wouldn’t know what he meant exactly but I’d think he was alluding to a kind of thickness of mind, a clogging of synapses, a sloshing quality of thought. In the cartoon version, I turn my head and milk spills out of my ears.

Wish I had more occasion to use “lo.”
Lo, a telephone ring.
Lo, the voice of the tourist rose high above the crowd to grate most oppressively on the ear.
Lo, the garbage truck thunders by.
Lo, the gorgeous tough women with the rocker butch haircut explains religion to the child across the room. Lo, the rain bounces off the asphalt.
Lo, the click, click, click of the espresso machine followed by the phlegmatic whir of the milk steaming.

Of course now – the image of a falling tower is a little too present in the minds of my contemporaries. It is hard to imagine a building stooping to its base without envisioning our own city’s towers falling to their knees in smoke and flame. And while our highest in status didn’t fall that day – so many of higher purpose and heroic proportions did. There’s something about the poignancy of the metaphor that becomes less symbolic and more the memory of the smell of smoke, lingering in the air for so many days.

1) What is Pyrrhus so mad about? He would seem to be winning. And why is he so mad that his aim suffers? He seems to have done a great job of killing folks this far.

2) Has Pyrrhus knocked Priam down without actually touching him with his sword? It sounds like just the disturbance of the air around the slash of the sword is what causes Priam to fall. It’s either a super powerful, earthshaking arc of a sword wake or Priam’s so unsteady on his feet that a strong wind blows him over. I guess he is unnervéd and if I’d just lost everything like him, I’d probably fall over when someone waved a sword in my direction. Whiff, wind, fall.

If this were a cartoon, the sword would have a face, one with lots of lines and a long white beard. As Priam attempted to lift it, the sword would groan and say, “No dice, soldier, I’ve been around the block too many times. It’s just not happening.”
Then Priam would shout at it, “Come on you old bounder. This is it. You don’t lift now. You’ll never lift again. Come on now lift!”
And the sword shakes his head (or his blade, really) and says, “Nope. Not doing it.”
Priam tries to reason with it. He reminds, the sword of all the battles they’ve won together. He calls up all the throats they’ve cut. All the limbs they’ve gashed, all the stomachs they’ve gored.
But still the sword lies where it falls. He tells Priam that it’s not like it used to be and he’s sorry but he just can’t move. And he just won’t.

Poor Priam. His city falling around his ears. His family decimated. The enemy swarms around him and his every attempt to send them off falls short. All he can do is swat them away with his sword. Is he in the parching streets as well? Has Priam left his palace to defend it? Or has Pyrrhus found him in his courtyard? Or his bedchamber? His throne room? Where is Priam to go with his city besieged?

So many times, upon hearing that I am a performer, I have been asked to a little acting or sing a little song. Aside from the wretched sense of embarrassment. I mentally felt in that situation, there was also always this question. What speech? What song? I somehow was always more likely to acquiesce to the request if a specific request was made. Somehow the request to speak a specific text or a specific song, saves me a lot of the embarrassment. Without that specificity, I turn into a jukebox whirring through all the text in my head trying to choose the right one, not knowing any of the criteria for the right one.

So I get stuck in the whir, cycling from one record to the next, one speech to the next, one song to the next, rejecting each one in turn. This one? No. This one? No. This one? No. I just need someone to make the selection. I don’t function well on Random.