My cat would be a poet if she could

My cat would be a poet if she could.

Perfection of the life, or of the work?

She chose the former—or, rather, had it chosen for her.

Once I arrived at Coole Park in Galway on my bicycle

In search of Lady Gregory

By hook or crook—

Too late, for it was 1971;

She’d died in 1932, they said—

Who now have here The Letters of Seamus Heaney for a bedside book.

See, Minou,* how easy it is to write poetry.

You simply string words together, one by one,

And somehow they make sense—

For some wanton passing sense will surely come.

Time passes so we groom our fur.

It’s how the better cats get fed;

No need to bake bread, or even purr.

*A pseudonym.

https://www.idyssey.online/post/my-cat-would-be-a-poet-if-she-could

The Words That Can't Be Said

"If I write for anyone, I wrote for you;

So whisper, when I die, We was too few . . ."

—Randall Jarrell, "A Conversation with the Devil"

They were too few, but that was not the trouble;

Even two would have sufficed!

Ah, Randall, Randall, you of all men knew,

The trouble is the words that can't be said,

For kindness' sake;

And poets are of all things kind

—even Rochester was, and Ezra Pound.

We cannot tell them what we've found,

It would be cruel, the World near dead

And all our hopes now just a bubble.

Postscript

"IMPOSSIBLE TO COME, LIE FOLLOWS"*

—Proust's duc de Guermantes, telegram refusing an invitation

The world that fails of course is mine

And those hopes vain not of your time!

*"IMPOSSIBLE VENIR, MENSONGE SUIT"

Aperçu: The p is silent, as in swimming

Max Klinger, Tod am Wasser (Der pinkelnde Tod) / Death by the Water (Death Pissing). Oil on canvas, 95 x 45 cm. 1881. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.

"The p is silent, as in swimming,"

my new office mate Mrs. Simpson said.

I was eighteen; I didn't know diddly-squat—

save that she was too old for me, and yet . . .

(But somewhere, too, a Mr. Simpson surely slept!)

Sixty-six years on, alas, she's dead.

(Athough it might be maybe not.)

If one had known then what now's perforce forgot . . .

(Ah, what one so often wished one knew!)

"Youth's a terrible thing to waste on the young," quips GBS's aperçu.

Notes: GBS is the familiar abbreviation for George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), still celebrated in the 1950s as a playwright and critic.

At least until the appearance ofThe Simpsons on television, the p in Simpson was not pronounced in the "British English" current in South Africa.