The Desperate Stars

The sands are shifting as you walk; walk on,

The new is an emptier darkness than the old.

—Empson

Empson was wrong in his second line:

The new darkness is in itself a universe

Of dark energy, dark matter, and dark time,

In which the desperate stars rehearse

A first act of heat and warmth and life,

Where sapients stumble, bad to worse.

(In mushroom shrouds a monkey wields a knife,

Hurling at some fellow apes a curse.)

What it all signifies is more than we can know,

Which doesn’t mean that we're not free to guess.

Perhaps dark time itself might have it so!

If dark matter flattered, would dark energy confess?

Epigraph: William Empson, “Letter II,” in Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935).

Note: “Dark energy and dark matter constitute 95% of the total mass–energy content [of the universe].”—https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter.

Glimmering Thresholds

. . . cold my wrinkled feet

Upon thy glimmering thresholds

—Tennyson, “Tithonus”

And yet my feet are not wrinkled

(They look so young!)

And neither are they cold

But warm, ready to advance

"Laureate, in classical metres"*

Toward a new horizon

Threshold glimmering or not

As I toward immortality proceed

I write these lines

Dissatisfied with the poems I've got:

All men are not by any means my brothers

All women not my mothers!

Yet I would take rosy-fingered Eos for a bride

If she reappeared on Petra’s Mytilenean shore

Where once I swam and now may swim no more.

Mais où sont les ouzos d'antan! †

* Words misquoted from Dame Edith Sitwell’s “When Sir Beelzebub . . . ”

† François Villon might not object, I suspect, to this adaptation of a famous line from his "Ballade des dames du temps jadis."

November 29, 2024

Fall

The Mississippi River downstream from the Washington Avenue Bridge, Minneapolis

“Fall comes to us as a prize

To rouse us toward our fate.”

—John Berryman, Dream Song no. 385

Berryman’s Dream Songs used to puzzle me.

Why would the man write such stuff?

And think it poetry? Then I got it.

They aren’t so much poems as suicide notes,

All three hundred and eighty-five of them,

Him striving to get the wording right before plunging off that bridge.

“Fall is grievy, brisk,” he said,

"and empty grows every bed."†

For my part—quoting Stendhal,

alongside other obiter dicta—

I hang in here out of political curiosity:

What'll the crazy dickheads do next this fall?

Whether or not these lines make poetry,

You'll get no suicide notes from me!

†Berryman, Dream Songs, nos. 385 and 1.

Thanksgiving, November 28, 2024