Conversation in the Forest

Clear, unscalable, ahead

Rise the Mountains of Instead,

From whose cold cascading streams

None may drink except in dreams.

—Auden, "Autumn Song"

Opaque, impossible to read

Springs the Forest of Indeed,

In whose impenetrable woods

You say you think you've got the goods?

And may suppose that you're at home

Plucking mushrooms from the loam—

Except it's toadstools heave in sight

(For convenience, they're all white).

To us the forest reaches out;

Of that embrace there is no doubt.

A hulking redbud overhangs

The deck with its offensive bangs,

Me, though, I feel safe down here—

It clear there's little I've to fear

Since I'll be toast before the ire

Of the supposed forthcoming fire.

I’ve written verse for Xi Jinping;

I've begged Volod’ka P. to sing.

But neither pays me any heed

In this great Forest of Indeed!

Why not, big guys, get back to me—

I might have what you need see,

You never know! The trees say, too,

That—it seems, because of you—

Those now impatient little sprouts

In coming days will loose the louts

And for want of attestation

Put an end to conversation.

June 9, 2024

Bonsoir Tristesse

For Roberta Phillips

Music for a while

Shall all your cares beguile.

—Purcell

I never wrote a poem or baked a loaf of bread

but felt it could be better done, despite what others said.

I know that it’s been raining because the cat is damp

and that it’s grown crepuscular and time to light the lamp.

I could tell that you’d been weeping because your cheeks were wet.

I guess I had been mean to you

—or mean as I could get,

which isn’t all that mean, you know, by standards martyrs set.

What does it truly matter if we weren't that great in bed?

What does it really matter now how long that you've been dead!

Your harpsichord has long been sold, and all your dreams are fled.

Epigraph: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=trOXaDeFeD4

June 7, 2024

Arachnophobia

Have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

—William Hazlitt, "On the Pleasure of Hating"

Hazlitt, “the first modern man,”* would not kill

a spider. “A child, a woman, a clown,”

even he himself a century before,

“would have crushed the little reptile to death

—my philosophy has got beyond that—

I bear the creature no ill-will, but still

I hate the very sight of it,” he says.

“It will ask another hundred years

of fine writing and hard thinking to

cure us of the prejudice.Ӡ Alas, no.

That was almost two centuries ago.

A prejudice takes long to cure in clowns

and moralizers. Spiders are good beasts.

But—it's Hazlitt's shtick—haters love hating.

*Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2008).

†Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating,” in The Plain Speaker (1826). The term "clown," as used by Hazlitt here, signifies a yokel or country bumpkin, a corruption of Middle English colonie, Latin colonus, farmer, colonist, from the verb colere, to cultivate, inhabit.