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

Banana Republican

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

—Anon.

A child contrived of Moctezuma and Nell Gwyn

(if not of Pocahontas and Ben Franklin)

in a fit of noncommittal I was born.

My genealogy at best is dim.

What's it to me if Dad were Cicero ("Chickpea")?

Bliss to be alive in that refulgent dawn,

already as an infant, and evolving spawn,

I shot my favorite spores as far as I could reach:

O hemispheric mycelium, mould of the free!

From Gulf of Trump to Patagonia's freezing beach,

'shroom 'publics sprang up, from sea to shining sea,

each with its patriotic banner

and presidential particolored sash,

a vaunted history, a torrid solipsistic manner,

basting its bombastic brats with nepotistic cash.

Back of them all, inevitably, the Big Banana.

Message to be found washed up in a plastic bottle in the former Costa Rica, ca. 3,000 CE.