Doubt

Our doubts are traitors,

And make us lose the good we oft might win

By fearing to attempt.—Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Come traitor doubt, you I embrace

In place of hope’s beguiling face,

The greatest traitor of them all

That draws despair up like a pall.

Evaded, we might have a chance

To dance at least a seemly dance,

Not cultivate some monkey creed

In whose foul name all life will bleed.

Where once we sailed the Seven Seas

To find new worlds to plunder, please,

We ought first to have asked the trees

And creatures of our native Earth.

These know full well what apes are worth

Who plot against the realm we've got.

November 2, 2024

The Dice Box: A Prose Poem

Max Jacob by Modigliani (1916)

“The truth is always new.”

—Max Jacob, Le cornet à dés (The Dice Box)†

A Jew from Quimper in Brittany,

Max saw a vision of Christ

And converted (feeling a bit queer).

Picasso was his roommate on the Boulevard Voltaire.

Max taught him French.

In ’44, with his siblings en route to Auschwitz,

Max asked Sacha Guitry to help—

The famous playwright had some pull with the Boche.

They liked his comedies.

He'd saved others before—

Even the Gestapo enjoyed a farce!

Sacha tried, it seems, but failed.

“If it were him,” he said,

“I might have done something!”

[« Si c’etait lui, je pourrais quelque chose ! »]

Then it was Max’s turn.

« Eh bien, c’est moi, » he wrote from a railroad car at the Drancy deportation camp

[« par la complaisance des gendarmes qui nous encadrent. »].

He died a few days later.

† Poetic licence—this is not actually in Max’s collection of prose poems Le cornet à dés (1917), but the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan insisted that Max said it, so I shall imagine it there.

October 31, 2024

An Archaic Smile

Moscophoros (Calf Bearer), Athens Acropolis (c. 570 BCE)

Music for a while

Shall all your cares beguile.—John Dryden / Henry Purcell, Oedipus (1692)

When you can’t write, write, an old saying goes:

You know what nobody else knows! But so

Do I. And should this knowledge be preserved

Or lost? And if the former, why? We need

To forget—it’s an essential human role.

To know the world we cannot grasp it whole,

But have rather to sum it up in bits

Working out for ourselves where each best fits.

Art was invented to preserve a trace

Against the rules that pin things in their place.

Rules, you argue, were made to be broken.

If so, I’ll leave my final thought unspoken

And simply offer an Archaic smile

To serve as music for a little while.

October 31, 2024