Family History

At Gulliver's tomb in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin

"O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!"*

It’s admitting muteness that one hates,

and the jockeys at the gates,

mounted monkeys—bad, bad, bad—

who drove us mad.

It’s admitting muteness that one hates.

Hansom cabs I don't recall.

How awful, to go there at all!

It's a monody that grates.

It’s admitting muteness . . . that one hates.

At Salonika, she had to learn

(in World War I)

the wage is oats, that horses earn.

It’s admitting muteness that one hates,

and the harnesses we face,

plucked from those untrammeled states

intrinsic to this bunch of grace.

H-O-U-Y-H-N-H-N-M

* "O slowly, run slowly, horses of the night!"—Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1592–93).

Ever since first reading this tremendous line (quoted by Marlowe from a very different context in Ovid's Amores) at my high school, the Hoërskool De Aar—over seventy years ago—I've itched to quote it, and now here's another opportunity.

December 1, 2024

Ok

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