Where the Problem Lies

For Lee Harvey Oswald

"Man was not born to solve the problem of the world, merely to discover where the problem lies."-- Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel / La Tabla de Flandes

With a Colt Cobra revolver in 1963,

Jack Ruby plugged you in the belly (aorta and kidney).*

You were killed, as JFK was—you’d blown his brain away;

you had some obsessive reason, though what no one can say.

You were young and foolish, you’d just turned twenty-four.

All this I’ve held onto those three score years no more.

There is no special logic: late on November 24

we were strolling in Marylebone, down Great Portland Street,

going to some trendy party—I had a girl to meet.

Someone told me what had happened, just a passing bore.

Why bring it up today then? You can write it off to age--

It’s not you I’m recalling, but remembering that page.

You cared about your Marina--a bit at any rate.

Did you know she remarried in a Texas town called Fate?

*On November 24, 1963, Ruby’s bullet “perforated the chest cavity, went through the diaphragm, spleen, and stomach. It cut off the main intestinal artery, and the aorta . . . as well as breaking up the right kidney.”--Attending surgeon quoted by Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK [New York: Random House, 1993], p. 397; the best book I’ve read on the subject.

11/24/2023

Theodicy

Für Gottfried Wilhelm

There's a chipmunk in my house.

It ran out toward me across the gleaming stovetop

This morning as I was pouring tea,

Driven no doubt by thirst--or hunger,

A pretty little creature with bright, inquisitive eyes,

Then fled back to safety behind the range.

Muggs, my toothless cat, waits patiently below.

She’s been after the critter for some days now

Ever since it first appeared in my bedroom, scuttling around a corner.

She’ll get it eventually and perhaps bring it to me unharmed, as she once did a baby rabbit (I set it free).

Or leave it for me on the stairway dead.

I, godlike, should not interfere, much as I might wish to. I'll see!

In this, the best--and only--possible world, as Leibniz said.

November 22, 2023

A Wise Baby Wises Up

AS ALL HUMAN existence begins, I began

with a catastrophe—the shock of becoming,

quickly followed by quack-brained circumcision, supposèd

preventative of future “self-abuse.”

(That insult having been endured by

Sigmund Freud in Moravian Příbor in 1856 at eight days old, he

was surely just as outraged as I,

but his Interpretation of Dreams

in 1899 records no memory of baby Beschneidung screams.)

Time went by—it’s boring, lying in a cradle—

but soon enough I toddled. Daddy by then

was in the Western Desert (a waste in Libya)

fighting the only war that’s properly called “Good”--

the one against Hitler’s evil brotherhood.

They’d sent my darling Leni away—the brown

meisietjie I loved, and she me—that’s trauma number three!

And since Mommy had to go to work all day,

she left me to the mercies of her own progenitor,

a Torquemada in the nursery—

she, I think, was likely number four!

Returned from the War, Daddy bore me on his back

far out on his surfboard, and we rode in,

shining sea water on his shoulders’ skin, to the False Bay beach

at Muizenberg, and on the drive home, went by reedy Seekooivlei.

But him, it seems, war had fitted up with feet of clay.

What happened I’ll never know—he’d never say.

The passage behind the Carlton Hotel’s bar—it’s

gone today, the prospect given him to fumble,

—reeked of booze (as well a pub corridor may),

a misplaced bit of memory’s ancient jumble.

Women weren’t legal in SA bars

back then, you see, I wonder if they had been, she . . .

no matter, let’s get back to knowledgeable me!

With my other Granny (the two grannies hated

each other), I played at sheltering, in ’42, or was it ’43?

under the kitchen table from Emperor Hirohito's submarines,

which were to bombard us for some reason it seems.

They didn’t—it was just foolery the grown-ups felt funny.

Unamused I took this thought away:

Never believe the things the big ones say!

Albeit thus, today, in 2023, fourscore and some birthdays later,

I don’t despise (heigh-ho) my place on Fortune’s escalator.