La girl en rose

For Marijke

La rue luisante où tout se mire ;

Le bus multicolore, le cab noir, la girl en rose

Et même un peu de soleil couchant on dirait . . .

—Valéry Larbaud, “Londres”

On awaking in the early hours

a fortnight before Christmas—

it was, I think, around Saint Lucy's Day,

in the eighty-fifth year of my life,

I found that all my friends had died

(the handful who had not were

playing dead—or had gone away).

I puzzled, lying there, half asleep:

Were we living still in Marylebone,

in the flat on Upper Montague Street?

If so, I'd better hurry and suit up

to catch my Metropolitan Line

train; she'd go to work at Bumpus—

later, it was Oliver & Boyd—

and everything would be just the same.

But like the rest, she's dead now—

long buried in a grave in Messenias

with a distant view of the Taygetos

(thus Jacinthe emailed me, I never saw the place).

I lie in bed here in my Piedmont house,

with views of the Blue Ridge and Jefferson's Monticello.

So what's empirical? You tell me!

We broke up amiably enough ages ago

(she raged at me when we last met,

but I'd foolishly said she smoked

too much, something smokers hate to hear—and it killed her).

They seemed so real, though,

the motley buses, black cabs, girl en rose.

December 16, 2024

Rhino à la mode

Salvador Dalí, Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas / Rhinoceros dressed in lace (1956)

Why did he make a farce of art?

He didn't give a monkey's fart,

Knowing that life runs to an end,

That you ought best yourself defend.

Now he's in fashion more and more,

No matter what there is in store.

He's almost a post-impressionist

Compared with others who persist.

Draped in quantum theory lace

That bullfight daggers pin in place

His bronze rhinoceros pleads grace

For artists who should go for broke:

There's nothing cooler than a joke,

Unless it's perhaps a mirror's smoke.

Real soon, I think, the game will finish.

There's not much left here to diminish.

December 14, 2024

Oedipus in Kolonáki

To the Great Dionysia I've fled,

with me my mother shall not wed.

My father’s grave on Afric's shore

I've honored properly—no more.

I asked three questions of the Sphinx,

"ingenuously," the creature thinks

(in the twenty-first century Thebes,

all Aspies are disdained as dweebs):

Should I have stayed where I was born

and nursed my swollen feet forlorn?

Should I have sought a fresh solution

different from the Revolution?

Should I have loved whom Heaven sent?

(If so, I wonder where she went!)

“No and Yes, and maybe No,

for loving ever is a trial,

even when you're good to go,"

the demon answered with a smile.

“Screw those eyes! Just do your best.

Take your medicine like the rest.

Antigone’s in the nice café

having a drink across the way.

Theseus, they say, is coming later.

Creon—naturally—’s a waiter.”

Then, vanishing at last it queried:

“So where'd it suit you to be buried?”

Note: Oedipus, "though racked with grief, / by the gods' grim design still reigned over the Kadmeians," the Odyssey asserts (Od. 11: 275–76, trans. Peter Green; see also the Iliad, trans. id., 23: 679, p. 432n8), and Hesiod says he died a wealthy landowner (Works and Days 162–63). The idea that he died at Kolonōs, just outside Athens, may thus have been an Athenian invention—perhaps by the octogenarian Sophocles himself in his last play, Oedipus at Kolonōs.

Since Kolonōs was evidently named for an eponymous hero, my identification of it with Kolonáki, named for a column standing there, where I lived and caroused in the 1960s, is unsustainable. Se non è vero, è ben trovato!

December 12, 2024