Rewrite Man

Andrea Mantegna, Caesar's Triumph. Ca. 1484–92. Hampton Court Palace, London

July, the month just ended,

Is named for Julius Caesar

Who boasts in his memoirs

Of slaughtering over a million

Celts and half a million Germans.

He exaggerated a bit, it seems,

But genocide was his calling card:

The Gauls' language is extinct;

Their French descendants speak

A child of Caesar's Latin tongue.

August, now commencing,

Honors Julius's heir Augustus,

Who ruled a vast empire

Based on slavery from end to end.

No slouch at homicide, moreover!

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

Are named for Norse warrior gods

Borne in raiding Viking longships

To loot, enslave, and murder

In what would later be called "the UK."

You'd like to change this tell-tale nomenclature?

The very best of brutish luck with that!

P.S. Don’t forget to rename Indiana while you're at it!

Note: The Gauls' leader Vercingetorix was imprisoned in Rome for six years after his surrender, then paraded through the streets and ceremonially garrotted in 46 BCE to celebrate Caesar's formal Triumph.

Friday, August 1, 2025

Now

For the poet William Stafford, in memoriam

Now we must try to go to sleep again

The cat meows softly in the bedroom dark

The night is quiet here, though downtown

There must be plenty of noise out there, I don't hear it

Only my tinnitus humming steadily away—

Like cosmic background radiation, I say,

An old friend

Every hour or two a Norfolk Southern goods train rumbles through the "back forty"

Cats teach us how to be alone in the world

Free and unafraid.

The smallest animal is wiser than a man:

Things you can't think, it can.

Thursday, July 31, 2025

Woah!

Woah! Among the Guardian Angels, which would hear me

If I yelled? And supposing one suddenly approached me,

I'd likely fall for its so-much-brighter Being—

Such beauty's the intimation of an unbearable frisson—

Gawking gobsmacked, impressed despite myself

By its quaint restraint . . .

All angels are scary! So what's to depend on? People??

—Rilke, Duino Elegy No. 1

The canny animals, Rilke explains, can tell

We're not all that comfortable

In our tight-constructed world. How right

They are! It's all an act that we put on.

As the generations of angels

Are the generations of spiders, cats, and owls.

Οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν:

"As the generations of leaves are the generations of men."*

We can't leave yet. Not until the angel tells us when.

"Down, wanton, down!"**

*Homer, Iliad 6.146.

**Title of a poem by Robert Graves.

Note: Rilke epigraph re-imitated by PRD from his earlier version of Duino No. 1 (April 17, 2024).

Wednesday, July 30, 2025