The Beggar's Opera

Godfrey Kneller, painting of an unknown man traditionally identified as John Gay

Life is a Jest, and all Things show it,

I thought so once, but now I know it.

—John Gay (1685–1732), epitaph on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, written by himself

What's memory? And is it time?

Or are we time—memory, its line?

The past is just a blurry face.

The joke's in the bits that we embrace,

The dead we loved, the going style.

Gay little knew what Brecht and Weill

Would make of his Opera and his wit,

And would he have approved of it?

Nobody’s best is ever good enough,

Some of us realize that; others don’t.

I’ve lived my life incompetently.

Signaling from around the bend, there’s nobody.

This should be the final line. It won’t.

Envoi

L’Opéra de quat’sous

in Malakoff—hard for me and you,

my dear, our French not up to it—

one staging post that I recall

on this long road into the Fall.

Friday, February 20, 2026

It Never Rains but It Pours

Paul Klee, Fire Clown (1920), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

“These winds will plummet your feel-like temps drastically.”—Weather Report

One day it may be useful to remember all this.

—Vergil, Aeneid 1.203

America's feast's movable

Even though New Yorker

Cartoons have turned unfunny.

And yet, and yet, and yet . . .

The promises aborning

Won't pay what one used to get

For jokes in ready money.

Blow, blow, thou winter's wind.

For natures so refined

There's little well designed

Or so I fear to find.

(Don't like to be unkind!)

We seek to find excuse

Philosophy let loose,

But it's no cockamamie use:

Those feel-like temps are blind!

Thursday, February 5, 2026

A Monkey's Wedding

A sunshower at sunset in the Mojave Desert

“ . . . they say here that the devil

Is beating his wife when the sun shines through the wires

of fine, fine rain”—Derek Walcott

That's in Trinidad. In Tennessee, Satan's kissing her.

In South Africa, Jackal's marrying Wolf's wife,

Or it's a monkey's wedding—

But in places, from Korea to Catalonia, a fox's wedding.

Each animal's a stand-in for a man who does what only humans can.

“Le diable bat sa femme pour avoir des crêpes,”*

Quebecois say. (You'll beat no wife of mine for pancakes;

No matter if for Johnny Canuck's sakes!)

Jackals, foxes, and apes, like folk, may wed on rainy days.

Afraid to be alone, they wish to be,

Lacking a better route to light in bed.

*“The devil beats his wife to get some crêpes.”

The Saint Lucian poet and playwright Sir Derek Alton Walcott OM (1930–2017) won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Saturday, January 24, 2026