The Musicians Rank Above Us

In lieu of an overture: Philippe Jaroussky singing "Che farò senza Euridice" from Orfeo ed Euridice by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87)

The musicians rank above us

I submit, lover of language

Though I am: no poet I know of can

Set the soul reeling like Bach, Gluck,

Schubert, or a hundred others.

Or move cold feet like rock 'n roll and jazz.

I'd say we might pass for younger brothers

If claim were made to Shakespeare's gauge,

But by that standard I'm an also-ran.

Best would be to combine poet and musician,

Like Orpheus, both demigod and man,

Who even so lost track of his main squeeze.

The ideal's as far off as peace or cold fusion;

We must make the best of the illusion:

One does what one does well when one can please,

And if no tornado, sufficiency's a breeze.

Breakage

“Scherven brengen geluk!”* they say

in Dutch—consoling all the more

This klutz, who'd broken on his way

Much stuff by 2024.

Rome in Italy's got a mound,

or hill, of antique pottery

Smashed before empire ran aground:

“Testaceo”—Mount “dei Cocci.”

Witness till the last century

of this anthropocentric time:

Good luck’s but temporary;

Misfortunate the Roman line.

Careless, I rap a glass on wood.

It breaks, the dear delicate thing.

I’d meant it no harm! But good.

Hard luck’s sapiential earning.

*"Shards bring luck!" The German version of this saying, which implies that luck = happiness, is “Scherben bringen Glück!”

Dressing Down

“When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation),—sleep, eating, and swilling—buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.”—Byron*

In 1792, or thereabouts, though in no way depressed,

Clad in a figured blue velvet tailcoat,

Colonel —— blew his brains out, leaving a paper on his desk

Saying that he’d been weary above all of getting dressed;

All that buttoning and unbuttoning, he opined,

exhausted one. No doubt!

George Gordon, Lord Byron, portrait by Thomas Phillips, ca. 1813

Lady ——, informed, too thought it best,

And donning a fashionable new petticoat,

Hanged herself in her bedroom closet like a stoat.

Luckily we aren’t reduced to such ostentatious means

Of escaping the tedium of the day-to-day,

Having handy by our bedsides phone, T-shirt and jeans,

We can accessorize our poor ends nowadays the digital way.

*Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1833), entry for December 7, 1813, p. 213.