The Arms Allowed

. . . the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce had his exile. Silence and cunning

eluded him—he was too fond of punning!

I might do better if I shed my love of rhyme,

perhaps not today; before the end of time.

Tipped in and out of waking by my brain,

I keep in mind that other famous rule

taught us long ago in bardic school:

"Never apologize! Never explain!"

Seeking to avoid the human stain,

I may be an idiot, but I’m not a fool!

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Mugwump of the Final Hour

Cartoon of Secretary of State James G. Blaine in the 1884 presidential election.

“You taught me language, and my profit on't

Is I know how to curse.”

—Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest I.ii.366–68

"mugwump of the final hour"—John Ashbery

Cursing becomes a cannibal

Self, I know, but would not have it so,

Who gaze upon a wider world

Which though improved in countless ways

Is the prime source of my dismay:

Like all my kin I live on human flesh

And cannot help it—unhappy

Vegetarian trapped in a universe of meat—

The scene of upright apes' deceit,

And all in all not what I wish.

And so I curse, knowing that things can—

And likely will—get worse. Words told in ancient times,

Shakya Gautama wrote some lines—

He was a Scythian trooper, like me,

But unlike me believed that he could see

A route by which to elude time's web.

It came to him beneath a tree

To which he'd fled from Darius the Great

King of kings and master of his state,

Who’d overthrown a magus named Gaumata.**

You call this “nonsense history”?

And so it is—but made of words, must be,

Since cursing's also made of words,

And lies are curses, too—if they matter!

*John Ashbery, "Alcove" (London Review of Books; Planisphere [2009]), appears to be referring to spring, but with him you never know! Two can play at that game, however, and I impute no agenda to it.

**So says the ancient Greek historian Κτησίᾱς (Ctesias) in his Indica, who also reports one-legged people there with feet so big they could serve as sunshades or umbrellas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctesias). See, too, the reference to the Magian Smerdis (the alleged imposter Gaumata, or Bardiya) in Jorge Luis Borges's narrative "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

Monday, November 17, 2025

86'd

Considerations on his 86^th birthday, respectfully plagiarizing Thomas Hardy's lines on a similar occasion a century ago . . .

Well, World, I have kept faith with you,

Kept faith with you;

Upon the whole you've proved to be

Much as I thought it seemed

When as a child I used to lie

Upon that sinkplaat dak and scan the sky,

Never, I own, expecting, no, not I,

That life would so quickly fly by.

Then you said, and since have said,

Many times have since said,

In the exacting voice that you affect

In clouds and hills respect:

“Many have loved me foolishly,

Many with smooth obliquity,

Though some have shown contempt for me

Till slid into the furnace fire."

“You did not promise overmuch, parent; overmuch—

Merely a Nobel Prize and such!"

I would remind the world of you,

Wise warning for your debtors’ sake,

Who also should not fail to take

A poem for the strain and ache

That ages hence assign.

Notes: Sinkplaat dak: a roof of corrugated or galvanized metal, typical of the old-fashioned domestic architecture of the Great Karoo.

Thomas Hardy's original poem ,"He Never Expected Much," can be found here, and at multiple other online sites: https://www.poetry.com/poem/36379/he-never-expected-much (1926).

Saturday, November 15, 2025