The Marrow Bones

Chaïm Soutine, Carcass of Beef, ca. 1925. Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

A hound there was that once inhabited my house.

Its doggy smell lurked in the stairwell when I came,

And out back in the woods were massive marrow bones—

Mementos of a steer that gave its mortgaged life.

That great dog’s vanished now; so has its canine reek.

The people who then had it here are all gone, too,

Their ghosts evaporating—unable to remain.

Tossed into a gully, though, the big bones speak.

Of the four fundamental forces physics finds,

Gravity's the weakest. Might weakness win at length?

Perhaps there’s a fifth force, its power weaker yet,

The force of suffering—spelled out by marrow bones,

A force that makes the impertinent stars retreat,

And shelter in remotest heaven from its strength?

Pieter Aertsen, A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms (1551). North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC.

Thursday, February 26, 2026

Little Father Time

“If I write for anyone, I wrote for you;

So whisper, when I die, We was too few;

Write over me (if you can write; I hardly knew)

That I—that I—but anything will do,

I'm satisfied. . . .”

 —Randall Jarrell, “A Conversation with the Devil”

[Contents, if any, to be assigned.]

Epigraph: Jarrell was thinking here, he explains, of the boy nicknamed “Little Father Time" in Thomas Hardy's last novel, Jude the Obscure, who hangs himself and his two half-siblings, leaving a note that reads: "Done because we are too menny [sic].”

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Dejection

Basso continuo

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

       A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief . . .

—Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode”

Were it but that, I would prefer some pang,

I might suppose if I were still deceived

By songs that in the old days once were sung,

Knowing myself, who unwisely believed

The fantasies of that heroic gang

With whom when younger I interred my bet,

But having learned: The unwise are all mad,

And its painful corollary regret:

Those who do no good may be viewed as bad,

Ask what’s the point conceding anything?

Yelp all you like, there’s nothing to be had,

Much though we ought to make the welkin ring!

 Note: “welkin” = the sky, heaven, cf. German Wolken, clouds. King Richard to his troops, Bosworth Field, August 22, 1485: “Amaze the welkin with your broken staves!” (Shakespeare, Richard III, 5.3.432).

Monday, February 22, 2026