Other Beings

The Hotel De Aar, in the Great Karoo, South Africa, many years later . . .

Of other beings I have known

Most have been human, so it seems,

But quite a few were cats, one dog—

No, more. but only the one was "mine"—

And Hansie, that Karakul sheep.

All of these had names they went by.

There have been chickens, too, and some

Of them I killed, beheading them

With an axe, laughing as they ran

Headless in circles in the dust

Of that benighted yard. I was

Just a child. Does that absolve me?

I cannot count the spiders that I've

Known, never mind their insect ilk,

Or all of those whose flesh I ate—

"Forget all this, says Earth to the stars," Tom Sleigh writes, having in mind a war;

"old bones that shake when the winds roar."*

*Tom Sleigh, "Before Rain," in House of Fact. House of Ruin (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2018), 68.

Friday, June 12, 2026

The Seekers

Anything, that is, except a giant green wormhole.

—Ben Travers, IndieWire, May 22, 2026

Is there a land beyond despair?

They asked, who there had fled.

I wrote an answer with a trembling hand:

I'm sorry, I don't understand.

The rules have ever been unfair.

The plot if any's underhand.

Why not expect, just take as read,

The gormless message of the dead—

The hapless hosts who went before?

They, too, once trembled at the door

And in invisible ink

Left notes as to how not to think,

But how to empty out a brain

That’s always seeking to explain!

Thursday, June 11, 2026

Afterthought Unbound

When [the gods] were about to bring [living creatures] to light, they gave Prometheus and Epimetheus the task of dealing out the appropriate attributes to them. Epimetheus begged Prometheus to let him do the dealing. “And when I have dealt,” he said, “you shall examine.”—Plato, Protagoras 320d

To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

Truth to tell, I abhor an unbinding,

Yesterday’s pudding pretending as new.

Life rehearses an embarrassed reminding;

Dying concludes but a heads-up’s review.

My brother’s liver fed Caucasian raptors

Now even the buzzards spurn my own guts.

No use protesting the mitigating factors—

Sempiternal as ever, those ifs, ands, and buts.

Pandora rose from the soil to greet me

With gifts, and I cottoned to her lies.

Writing such lines to see what I'd see

(Teenage chicks pecking out my eyes!)

I judged the whole lot to be as dumb as could be

—Promethean fireflies. Damnèd disguise!

Note: Prometheus and Epimetheus, the ancient Greek names of the mythological twins alluded to here, are said to mean Forethought and Afterthought.

Monday, June 8, 2026