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

Fall

The Mississippi River downstream from the Washington Avenue Bridge, Minneapolis

“Fall comes to us as a prize

To rouse us toward our fate.”

—John Berryman, Dream Song no. 385

Berryman’s Dream Songs used to puzzle me.

Why would the man write such stuff?

And think it poetry? Then I got it.

They aren’t so much poems as suicide notes,

All three hundred and eighty-five of them,

Him striving to get the wording right before plunging off that bridge.

“Fall is grievy, brisk,” he said,

"and empty grows every bed."†

For my part—quoting Stendhal,

alongside other obiter dicta—

I hang in here out of political curiosity:

What'll the crazy dickheads do next this fall?

Whether or not these lines make poetry,

You'll get no suicide notes from me!

†Berryman, Dream Songs, nos. 385 and 1.

Thanksgiving, November 28, 2024

The Serpent and the File: A Fable

Boomslang photographed near Botrivier, Western Cape, South Africa

After La Fontaine

In a time yet to be, when the art of writing and the alphabet had long been lost,

A coronal mass ejection from the sun wiping out the Internet

Irreparably, all knowledge left was encoded in the memories

Of human beings otherwise good for nothing, called “Files.”

The Sixth Mass Extinction had

Left scant nonhuman animal life on Earth.

Of snakes only a single species suvived

Dispholidus typus, the Boomslang,

Of which a single individual

In a sudden burst of speciation had evolved intelligence of a superior kind—such things are inevitable,

The zoötic cosmological principle teaches,

Once life has begun on a planet circling its sun.

They must be what God—or the Universe—intends.

A tree remaining in Africa from which this wise Boomslang hung

Contemplating the nature of things,

Like Aristotle or La Boétie,

A memorious old File

Muttering the facts that were his raison d’être

Happened to pass beneath

And seeing the serpent on the bough

Seized it in his teeth and bit down viciously .

“Ah,” said the snake, “poor foolish File,

What do you seek to do?

Destroy that which is so much wiser than you?

All you wretched creatures know

Is how to remember and how to bite!”*

So saying, sadly, it died:

Intelligence would perforce await

Another aeon to delight.

*Ceci s’adresse à vous, esprits du dernier ordre,

Qui n’étant bons à rien cherchez sur tout à mordre.

Vous vous tourmentez vainement.

Croyez-vous que vos dents impriment leurs outrages

Sur tant de beaux ouvrages ?

—Jean de La Fontaine, “Le serpent et la lime” (1668)

For the full text of La Fontaine's fable, see: https://www.poesie-francaise.fr/jean-de-la-fontaine/fable-le-serpent-et-la-lime.php.