Woah!

Woah! Among the Guardian Angels, which would hear me

If I yelled? And supposing one suddenly approached me,

I'd likely fall for its so-much-brighter Being—

Such beauty's the intimation of an unbearable frisson—

Gawking gobsmacked, impressed despite myself

By its quaint restraint . . .

All angels are scary! So what's to depend on? People??

—Rilke, Duino Elegy No. 1

The canny animals, Rilke explains, can tell

We're not all that comfortable

In our tight-constructed world. How right

They are! It's all an act that we put on.

As the generations of angels

Are the generations of spiders, cats, and owls.

Οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν:

"As the generations of leaves are the generations of men."*

We can't leave yet. Not until the angel tells us when.

"Down, wanton, down!"**

*Homer, Iliad 6.146.

**Title of a poem by Robert Graves.

Note: Rilke epigraph re-imitated by PRD from his earlier version of Duino No. 1 (April 17, 2024).

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Memory Foam

I cannot see what I would see

Of sunlit days beside the sea;

What now are soul and heart to me

Who have mislaid that memory?

When in the search I cast about

For some mnemonic path or route

To lead to what I would find out

I stumble through cold waves of doubt

That sweep the ocean of this world

In which the quanta are unfurled

And fragments of the past are swirled.

To what blind future am I hurled

In which no lasting record sings

Of those now lost beloved things,

The hands once held, the silver ring,

Or even of our parting's sting?

All I can deduce from this

Is that a kiss is just a kiss;

Love is merely hit and miss;

Its music's but the ocean's hiss,

The cosmic background radiation

That is the shine on old tarnation:

Between the zero and the one

There's room enough to have some fun.

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Wake Up Call

Ford Madox Brown, The Death of Sir Tristram (1864). Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England

"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."—Tom Lehrer

O once and future King,

Arthur, asleep at Avalon,

. . . rex quondam rexque futurus . . .

The liberal delights of which we once were fond

Have been tossed under the bus,

Done in by algorithms

That someday soon a mighty solar flare

In smithereens will sweep away,

Or so we hope!

Most likely fate will do us in, instead,

Reduce us to AI's poor zombie dead.

Yet we would live, whom life was thrust upon—

We're fucked if we'll that way be gone!

With liberal democracy now no more the rage,

What better than to restore the Feudal Age?

Tuesday, July 29, 2025