A Million Nows

I reckon it must be a million nows

Since that Sunday on Upper Montague

Street in 1963 when

We three, snug in our new nest,

Breakfasted on bagels, avidly

Read The Observer and The Sunday Times,

And thought . . . What did we then think?

I forget,  of course, vividly though that now

Now returns to me in its forlorn nowish way

Like a dog lost on a holiday a thousand miles away

That turns up again one day, with a sheepish smile,

Having somehow made its way back,

Against

All the odds, that proudly says, “I'm not like other dogs!

How could you lose me when the time is now?

I am distinct, exist, I’m me. No matter what you do,

I'll always love you anyhow!”

Infinity's not a number—"always" is eternity.

Enduring is a now.

"Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed."—Henri Bergson

Sunday, January 4, 2026

A Reckoning

Ludwig Hohlwein, Nachtigall vor Vollmond (1910)

"A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude"—Shelley

So much in love with easeful life,

Enough's a country free of strife,

But must be taken "warts and all."

Circumstances might pass for good—

We, doubtless of the five percent,

Want little but a friendly mood,

A sturdy bed and processed food.

I wonder where the others went

Who've now all vanished from the Earth?

Volatilized in Nature's berth!

The nightingale is the national bird

of Ukraine

Volatiliser

Disparaître soudainement, sans laisser de trace.—Dictionary of the French Academy. "Mes amis se sont volatilisées dans la nature."

Thursday, January 1, 2026

"Le secret confié se volatilise et disparaît dans le vent des années qui passent."—Charles Flor O'Squarr (1830–90), Les fantômes, étude cruelle.

Unto This Last

Odysseus and the sirens. Attic red-figure stamnos from Vulci, 480–470 BCE, in the British Museum, illustrating the episode in the Odyssey 12.61–62, 212–36: "let every ear / Be stopp'd against the song! 'tis death to hear!" (trans. Pope)

A sonnet composed after watching Jane Campion's Keats biopic "Bright Star"

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, the adage

Whispered by an old inmate of our cage,

We listen to the song that's "death to hear";

Keats' nightingale is surely somewhere here,

Singing its little heart out! O bright star,

Unlike false Cortez to whose eyes, afar,

The ocean heaved into view "in Darien,"

We gaze, not on the Pacific, but men,

Whose leavings rehearse the sirens' voices,

Their easeful life disguising fatal choices.

Surely there is still time to fix the mess!

Can't we back up a bit and reassess?

This "nothing" might yet be Nirvana's shore—

We live again lost loves and banish war??

But no. You should have thought of that before!

That was the last of it. There's no fucking more!

Friday, January 2, 2026