The Sameness of the Same

Chaïm Soutine, The Room Service Waiter (1927). Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris.

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.—Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV)

"Brown shoes don't make it."—Frank Zappa

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,

A French savant opined in 1849, a year of failed revolutions:

"The more things change, the more it stays the same."

Born a century later, I could say that, too!

I lie in bed and sip my coffee, searching for solutions,

Not to blame for the saucy sameness of the same—

Heaven knows!

2/28/26

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