Skullfire

To burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame . . . is success in life.

—Walter Pater

And the ocean water stirs

In salt-worn casement and porch.

Plies the blunt-nosed fish

With fire in his skull for torch.

—Walter de la Mare, “Sunk Lyonesse”

Burning a hard gemlike flame,

Probing deadly, just a game—

Polymorphous perverse conjecture—

We in extreme spirit venture,

From Southern Seas to Northern Lights,

Seeking thrills and novel sights

From the heights of Hurlevent,*

Not much grasping what we can’t.

In the far future, with our dug-up bones,

Archaeologists will unearth our phones,

Relics of the Anthropic Age,

Glad in New Lyonesse to have skipped that page:

No click-bait come-ons to enrage,

Idiotic gossip to depress.

* Les Hauts de Hurlevent is the French title of Wuthering Heights.

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

Dodo

Hans Savery, painting of a dodo (1651)

A quarry takes a bite out of a hill;

Shot whale turns belly uppermost; fake star

Intones an orbit; chimney sirens cry:

Labour is holy! Profit is better than prayer!

Fish in fetid rivers die;

Dodo is dead.

—Jack Beeching

"So what?" they say. "We’ll bring back the dodo yet.

It’s just a trick with DNA.

We’ve almost revived the woolly mammoth,

Tasmanian tiger, and dire wolf.

We'll resurrect the dodo, too, one day.

You wanna bet?"

"What use?" you cry. "What earthly use!"

"I’ll tell you what! Dodo by and by

May serve as totem for our ingenious race

When we’ve all gone off to a better place:

Dodos aplenty Elon’ll have on Mars.

They’ll play around his feet beneath the stars."

Jack Beeching epigraph from Penguin Modern Poets 16 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1970). A fine historian and poet, Jack Beeching is, alas, all but forgotten today.

Sunday, May 11, 2025

Autoclave

Smoke rings rise from Mount Etna in Sicily, the tallest active volcano in Europe

An old order perishing, the first of many,

What price America? Apartheid? Liberalism?

Country music? Convoking humankind's

Scattered wits in her vast Autoclave,

To issue with pontifical steam first-class

Primate tickets in this self-promoting zoo,

Gaia blows an experimental puff or two.

Gaudeamus igitur! * The smoke is white!

Though selective evolution is the fix in sight,

Robed lobsterbacks' pious ranks give thanks

In the Sistine Chapel behind hermetic doors,

The key so big, lock resisting withered paws,

It's Darwin cures what hurt Earth abhors!

(A promisory outcome wanted by the banks.)

* Gaudeamus igitur! = Latin, "Let us rejoice!"

Thursday, May 8, 2025