Parthian Tears

John Philip Simpson, The Captive Slave (1827)

For King Charles III at his coronation

. . . wound, like Parthians, while you fly,

And kill with a retreating eye.

— Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1678)

On November 14, ’48,

the day before I turned nine,

I was reading H. G. Wells’s The Time

Machine in the Hotel De Aar

with my brand-new puppy

snoozing at my feet—

Rusty, I'd named him,

a Rhodesian ridgeback’s

half-breed offspring,

got on a dachshund mate,

a farmer’s gift.

Outside, the ochre smart

of the Great Karoo’s whirling dust,

hit the second-story windows, hoo-hoo,

while elsewhere, somewhere, Lilibet,

whom my teasing aunts had promised

I’d get as bride one day, gave birth,

it seems, to you.

I confess I wept for you, Majesty,

at your coronation—a sigh

from post-postcolonial slave station

to mortgaged bouncy castle

estate . . . for we are relatives,

your granddad was my liege, you know,

and all of us kin to Genghis Khan,

as everyone is, of course

—the old boy lived an age ago,

all trace of him now faded.

Even so, una furtiva lagrima,

a tear, or two, sprang to my eye.

Envoi

I tell a lie!

There was no dust storm

that year—it was in '49,

and for myself that summer

that I shed those “Parthian tears," if I did.

And how could these memories make

any difference in any case to the likes of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha you?

All’s tickety-boo!

Note: The Parthians, a nomadic people who long ruled the Iranian empire, successfully resisted Roman imperial expansion in Asia, famously employing a tactic that became known as “the Parthian shot,” in which mounted archers swiveled their upper bodies at full gallop to shoot at a pursuing enemy.

Squeak o’ the mouse to James Elkins for Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (2001).

A different version of this poem was published in the New English Review in June 2023.

Concupiscence

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even / La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. Oil, varnish, foil, wire, and dust on glass (1915–23). Philadelphia Museum of Art.

"Oh vie vécue depuis quel temps!"—Rilke*

Concupiscence is dust on glass.

Let it be, all this must pass.

There's not much concupiscence

In sense, and little sense

In concupiscence. Good art

Wants time spent on the fence.

Don't put the horse behind the cart,

Heed the spirit's nod to start.

S/he loves to serve but life is blind:

S/he serves for love but seeks to find

A better way to prime the mind

So as to make the present past,

Past present. Happy happens very fast.

You might miss it if you blink,

It's less contingent than you think.

Curtail not then the competition.

A fine romance is not a mission.

Content might be the best edition.

*"Oh life lived since who knows when!" In The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. A Poulin, Jr. (Saint Paul, MN: Gray Wolf Press, 2002), 366.

Port with Lemon

The church in Repton, Derbyshire, in whose crypt the Anglo-Saxon Saint Wigstan (or Wystan) was buried

“I think that poetry is fundamentally frivolity. I do it because I like it."

—W. H. Auden, March 19, 1947

In Latin, frivolous means trifling, worthless, silly—

The verb’s friare, to rub away, or crumble,*

Our “frig”† and “friction,” are diction conceivably

Cognate willy-nilly, but not “fumble.”

Like HenryJames “a great and talkative man,”‡

Maitre Wystan in his Table Talk is never humble.

Asking Hannah Arendt's hand in marriage,

She begging to decline—he ponged like a clochard,**

He's overheard vengefully to grumble:

“Women should drink port with lemon”

(not liquor all alone in bars sans bossy bards).

Fending off the Noonday Demon,

Compensating hoi polloi's dearth of kind regards,

It's with frivolity poets wear stone away.

Schöngeistig†† sometimes though this master's cards,

I like them, too—and RIP has all too long a stay!

*“French frivolité, from Old French frivole “frivolous.” . . . From Latin frivolous ‘silly, empty, trifling, worthless,’ diminutive of *frivos ‘broken, crumbled,’ from friare ‘break, rub away, crumble’ . . .” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/frivolity).

†An old synonym for "fuck," from Middle English fryggen, to wriggle.

‡Auden, “At the Grave of Henry James.”

**"Ponged like a clochard" = stank like homeless drunk.

††Schöngeistig = esthetic, high-minded, affected . . . maybe now "woke"? A pet put-down of Auden's with reference to Rilke.

Epigraph—Auden to company at tea—and quotes: Alan Ansen's The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1990), 37, 39, 99.