Literary Corner: Assembled from the Unsaid

Lnadscape by Takeuchi Seihō (1864-1942), from somebody's Pinterest again.

Poetry about President Trump, as opposed to poetry by him, is inevitably a kind of nature poetry, a study in rapid atmospheric shifts. Here, the Secretary of Commerce, one of the president's Palm Beach neighbors and a former owner of the Bank of Cyprus, tries to capture for press reporters the feeling of wondering whether the United States will be plunged next week into a trade war with some of its closest allies (Canada, South Korea, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates, one of the main US sources for aluminum, I'll bet you didn't know that, on which a 10% import duty will be imposed, if it is raised at all, unless Trump decides to make it some other number, or make an exception for the UAE in recognition of their generous support for his son-in-law in this time of financial troubles, unless he wants to punish them for doing that because it's made him uncomfortable, or because they failed to cut him in), in delicate and mysterious brushstrokes in a tone that, as always seems to be the case with the Secretary, seems composed out of erasures, assembled from the unsaid.

Prophecy

by Wilbur Ross

Whatever his final
decision is is what
will happen. What he has
said he has said; if he
says something different,
it will be something
different. The president
has announced that this will
happen this week. I have no
reason to think otherwise.

(Text from NBC News)

Democratic senators wrote to Ross in February [2017] demanding that he disclose “the full extent of your connections to Russia”. Ross did not respond. The senators also lambasted the White House for refusing to provide answers to the questions before the vote confirming Ross.

Asked around that time whether Bank of Cyprus [of which Ross led the billion-dollar takeover from Dmitry Rybolovlev, another Palm Beach neighbor, in 2014] had any customers under US sanctions during his time there, Ross told CNN: “That’s a question that is very complicated to answer,” adding that he had never approved any such deals. [Guardian]