A Trillionaire

Gilded sphere containing Tesla's ashes. Nikola Tesla Museum, Belgrade.

Let none admire

That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best

Deserve the precious bane.

—Milton, Paradise Lost 1.690–92

Like other folk, to be rich my desire,

With in second place the fat fruit of fame,

I stormed high Heaven with unholy fire,

Robbing old NickyTesla of his name!

And now, surrounded by my bodyguards,

With legal legions spent in just deserts,

I tower trillioned over Gaia's shards—

The landfill left of what was once the Earth’s.

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

An Angry Rabbit?

Parmigianino depicts an angry rabbit

At the circumcision of Christ — no, it's

Two of them, the other scuttling away!

Little Lord Jesus, submitting to this ritual habit,

Regards his trimming with Nicaean aplomb.

The Virgin's steady, tough blondie Mom

Views the mohel's miniature snickersnee

In manicured fingers! Ready teddy . . .

In a Parmigianino portrait from 1523, I

Fagiolo dell’Arco saw a dead rat—

An alchemical symbol, or something like that.

It's an antique statuette, actually.

"Revelatory detail" leads the eye astray;*

Who knows, though, what the mindful might say!

Parmigianino, The Circumcision (1523). Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.

*James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles ? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 204. Elkins quotes Daniel Arasse, Le Détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 266.

Thursday, March 12, 2026

The Drying of the Paint

“I wonder why I write verses for nobody reads them.”

—Shelley (in 1820)

Learn to live with brute despair,

Since the slughorn reason’s there,

Full in view, embattled sight—

Allow yourself a luck that's bare!

Seeking merely, find the right.

Bid a fond farewell to hope,

Always such a slippery slope!

Like a little, the love you bear.

What to do, though, if you can’t,

My fellow stoic supplicant,

Puzzling how to forge some good

And yet be widely understood?

Scan the surface! Make it new!*

The paint? It's drying quickly, too!

*Make It New, the title of a 1934 collection of essays by the poet Ezra Pound, became the battle cry of the modernist movement in art and literature.

Epigraph: Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, quoted in Ann Wroe, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), 258.

Tuesday, March 10, 2026