Spuyten Duyvil

Ernest Lawson, Shadows, Spuyten Duyvil Hill (ca. 1910)

 “I ask you, what's the point of stealing something if no one knows it's stolen save the stealer?—John Banville, The Blue Guitar

When I first came to America, in 1972,

I walked out one morning in Riverdale,

New York, on garbage pickup day

And marveled at the things Americans threw away.

I've been here over half a century, and still do.

They toss out their own history, dismayed by its suspect smell

(but Ambrose Bierce could have told you that as well).

Incredibly, many now seem to be discarding jazz,

Louis Armstrong is, for lots of them, a been that has,

Ditching their native music and its holy arts,

Replacing truth with meretricious farts.

In Riverdale, that April morning, I retrieved a black sweater

And wore it till it wore out—when I found a better.

One man’s trash is another’s treasure—

Objets trouvés have always been a pleasure.

I do, of course, exaggerate.

And you’ve a pile of nothing on your Amazonian plate.

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

The Saints Go Marching In

“Voted that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted, that we are the Saints.”—minutes of the town council of Milford, Connecticut, 1640

Sanctity

Of sanctity we make no bones:

On stolen land, we build our homes;

All countries in which men abide

Knew slavery and genocide.

Don't confess to ancestral crimes—

You were not there in those bad times.

Just be quite sure that we can say:

“They fake things fairer now today!”

Epigraph source: Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 192.

The Pitiless Bronze

Ours is not a world propitious to Poetry,

Though for poets’ tales it is, with screwball odds:

Homer’s “pitiless bronze” slew living, breathing bods!

Uhlans charged

Nazi Panzers at Krojanty.*

Fishing boats trump aircraft carriers in the Pinkish Sea.

* Evidently Polish cavalry did not in fact charge Nazi tanks at Krojanty in 1939, but did charge machine guns.

Speaking in Tongues

When I was ten or so in the Karoo

I went to meetings with a pal or two

Where rustic Pentecostals spoke in tongues.

We sidled among the yawping grownups,

Hoping to score some of the pastry treats

On hand, Evangelical service done,

Among these, especially, koeksiesters,

Donut braids cooked in spiced sugar syrup

(theirs was the Afrikaner sort, sprung from

the Cape Malay) that the urgent gabble

Seeming summoned, sweet as the just deserts

Served up in sophistry’s foody battle.

Not mnemonic madeleines, De Aar no

Combray, nor I a Proust, their memory

Still serves today, seventy-five years on,

To evoke the unintelligible:

Poets echoing Xenoglossia’s* bark

Now backed by a strong academic team;

Unfriended pigeons poisoned in the park.†

Every book a preternatural scream.

* Xenoglossia is distinguished from simple glossolalia inasmuch as the words uttered are considered to be in an actual foreign tongue—albeit one unknown to the speaker.

† Thanks for this line to the late Tom Lehrer (1928–2025).

Header image from Immaculate Bites,

https://www.africanbites.com/traditional-koeksisters.

Monday, November 3, 2025