Now and Then

Oh, God, make small

The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,

That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.—T. E. Hulme

I thought—that’s if I thought of it at all—

I’d like the music of the future when it came,

But now it’s here and being sung

The song’s all wrong;

The singer’s got the  words confused,

And sings them like a cat with mange.

I did not suppose the sound of things to come would be so blasted strange!

Note: Artillery Lieutenant Tom Hulme was killed by a shell at Oostduinkerke in Flanders in September 1917. Lost in thought, he failed to take cover like those around him when it was heard coming.

Vichyssoise

“Forget grammar and think about potatoes.”—Gertrude Stein

“History is the pack of lies agreed upon,”

Napoleon said—or was it old Fontanelle,

Who in his nineties flirted with fair Minette?

(“Ah, Madame, if only I were eighty again!”)*

Finding myself tangled in despair’s sticky web,

a labyrinth whose gaping entrance is a snare

set in its place by intellectual disdain,

I fled the asserted for fancy’s foolish bet,

which in a torrid hour ghosts deem “reality”—

things being what perpends, no mind their human fame.

Dissing Bump City’s claim to be a real place

“There’s no there there!” Gertrude declared to gay hurrahs.†

 “A rose is a rose is a rose.” That would explain

the mess of potage served by her as Vichyssoise.

Pablo Picasso, Leeks, Fish Head, Skull, and Pitcher (1945)

* The nonagenarian Enlightenment poet and philosopher Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757) on his being introduced to the beautiful salonnière Anne-Catherine Helvétius.

† Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), on Oakland, California, where she had been brought up. For this and the epigraph, see, e.g., Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025).

May 2, 2025

The Formula

Its formula escapes you; it has lost

The certainty that constitutes a thing.

—W. H. Auden, “Brussels in Winter”

Born into the British Empire,

George VI was king-emperor—

His face was on our postage stamps.

Men died for him at Alamein and Singapore.

The empire is long gone today—

His Royal Navy’s ships are sunk;

While in an office far away

A hulking figure dims the lamps

And wonders what great power’s for.

Thursday, April 24, 2025