Future Things

Random rubbish rummaged through,

Outdated papers—nothing new.

Pictures sorted, search enabled,

All appropriately labeled.

Books upon the shelves arrayed.

Tchotchkes for the nonce displayed.

Posterity soaking in the sink.

Perhaps a good time now to think!

Spring's arriving in the garden—

Winter's wrought its usual wreck

Never deigning to beg pardon.

From the sideboard hors d'oeuvres beckon,

Chaise longue–seated on the deck,

Guests imbibing gin and tonic

Discuss the future things ironic

With which, tomorrow, they must reckon.

A Moment After

The movement of time

Is shaken in these seas, and what one does

One moment has no might upon the moment

That follows after.

—Yeats, The Shadowy Waters

What, though we may suppose it might,

Could bind together the halves, once severed,

Of this fruit upon the world’s great serving dish

If each moment it’s remade anew,

With just a shadow

Of the old to play upon the mind

And thus perfect the portrait’s wish?

If you remember differently to me,

Maybe things were different where you are,

And neither's neither right nor wrong.

"The yew-bough has been broken into two,

And all the birds are scattered — O! O! O!

Farewell!"*

No more to say—or that can be said—

In this eternity once more of science, and falsifiability. We may perhaps hope to scent its pattern when we're dead!

*William Butler Yeats, The Shadowy Waters (1900).

Ode for the Dancers

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787)

"It is the traditional inspiration of the philosopher, but also his traditional vice, to believe that all is one."—Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (1970)

Link what you contrive to others’ sense.

You aren’t the only one to feel that way,

The world seemed like from where they sat

Who, sighing, contemplated it—their sigh.

Don’t take some handy platitude for wit,

Or rambling for rebuttal of a lie.

Enough’s enough’s the best part of why.

Too much of a good thing might well be shit!

I choose my epigrams—or they choose me!

How could I trace cogitation’s unsigned road

Not letting it go where it likes, free,

Ease wayfarers of mind’s costive load?

We have a right to these traditions*

Earned in the immemorial blink of Time—

Our forebears fought to hold their positions,

In the stern Dancing Master’s line.

*Cf. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1962), 164: “We have a right to this tradition greater than that which the inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have.”