Pretending

Cornelis van Haarlem, The Fall of the Titans (ca. 1596–98). National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

I'll just pretend I never heard it!

This is Arcadia in 378 AD.

I won’t believe the Emperor was beaten by the Goths,

who will presently stream in and destroy the known world!

God knows, I was depressed before, but this!

The Titans once made trouble, too,

and Zeus slew them with his thunderbolts.

So will Heaven these new barbarians.

Valens dead, our army smashed, they say?

I simply won’t believe it!

Why, here in Megalopolis, things are A-OK!

June 4, 2024

Sense and Sensibility

Our risk is not that we keep warm at night,

But that we may not work as long as there is light.

—Robert Bhain Campbell

Do we choose what to remember? Maybe

It’s the act of remembering rather

Than the thing remembered that’s important:

That we should obtain some task, though daunting

Or obscure, to give meaning to our life,

Adding in that way to universal sense

And sensibility, absent before.

The spider spins its web remembering

That it must needs persist if it's to eat,

Then eats what turns up—or mummies the thing

For such nice offspring as it may conceive.

So I, too, labor, producing these lines,

Hoping, perhaps, for progeny in time

Let loose in fancy, whether yours or mine.

Epigraph: Robert Bhain Campbell, “Crime and Counter-Crime,” in The Task (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945), 9. Campbell died of cancer on December 3, 1940, aged of twenty-eight, leaving just this posthumous collection.

Making Sense

William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794)

'I know, I know, I know,’ he said,

‘but you have to try to make sense of what comes.

Remember everything and keep your head.’

—Seamus Heaney, Station Island

Other folk have slept in this room on other sheets,

when they had sheets (they often did), and awoke

to other dawns and hopeless or hopeful days,

walked down other streets, sometimes even the same ones,

were deceived by other lies,

though much like these of ours,

did what they had to, tried to make sense of what came, remembered what they could.

They’re dead and gone now, many glad to go.

Let’s raise a glass to them.

Poor dears, they didn’t know!

Neither do we, who also piss away our time,

and blame our weaknesses on some bigger baddie.

Thus it’s ordained: "Vengeance is mine;

I will repay,”* says Nobodaddy,

“With darkness & obscurity

In all my words & laws

That none dare eat the fruit but from

The wily serpent’s jaws.”†

*Romans 12:19, NKJV.

†William Blake, “To Nobodaddy,”

tweaked.