Reveille

Where there are many chickens, the night’s over.—proverbial saying*

They claim now that the converted Khazar khanate† never was.

I think it must have done—because

coming home to roost, its chickens

have built their nests and laid their eggs so well

in the daunting dauntless state of Israel.

Indisputably, then, the plot thickens!

Khmelnytsky may have been a nasty bit of work,

but his Zaporozhians fought Pole, Swede, and Turk;

Khazars, Cossacks, and Kazakhs,

for the new Völkerwanderung are much the same:

Fodder for the patriotic game.

History, I think it was Voltaire that said,

is the BS currently ahead.

And clearly when the chicks proliferate,

of course, we cocks should celebrate.

Here, then, is your Rhodes, here dance!**

If in doubt, attend—I fear we all must—the school

of our mighty magpie Khan of Khans

. . . la bouche en cul-de-poule.

*Wo viele Hähne sind, da ist die Nacht hin. / Là où il y a beaucoup de poules, la nuit est finie.

†See Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (1976),

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Tribe.

‡Völkerwanderung = the great migration era in which Germanic, Slavic, Finno-Ugrian, and other tribes distributed themselves around Europe, ca. 300 to 900 CE.

**"Hic Rhodus, hic salta," https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hic_Rhodus,_hic_salta:

December 18, 2024

The Liberating Word

“It is equally undesirable to think oneself a poet and to think that one is not a poet. That is something that we never find out.”—Eliot, Letters, 7: 333

“the poet who fears to take the risk that what he writes may turn out not to be poetry at all, is a man who has surely failed, who ought to have adopted some less adventurous vocation.”—Eliot, CP 4: 368

“He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse, but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.”—Dr Johnson, “John Milton”

“The verse created like thy theme sublime, / In number, weight, and measure, needs not rhyme.”—Andrew Marvell, “On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost”

“This neglect then of Rhime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem’d an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.”—John Milton, “Introduction” to Paradise Lost (London, 1674)

I wanted to write a poem

that you would understand.

For what good is it to me

If you can’t understand it?

                             But you gotta try hard—

William Carlos Williams, “January Morning,” XV

In “plain American that cats and dogs can read”—Marianne Moore

For to write what you can about the world makes it almost bearable.—Randall Jarrell

Everything we do consists of trying to find the liberating word.

—Wittgenstein in conversation with Schlick

December 17, 2024

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