A Beating of Wings

You distance yourself from me, time,

And wound me with your beating wings.

How could my mouth forget a line?

What's to do about quotidian things?

I have no lover left, no home,

No place to reorder my life.

The things that summon me to strife

Grow rich and cut me to the bone.

Freely imitated from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke in his Neue Gedichte (1907), who entitled it simply "The Poet":

Der Dichter

Du entfernst dich von mir, du Stunde.

Wunden schlägt mir dein Flügelschlag.

Allein: was soll ich mit meinem Munde?

Mit meiner Nacht? Mit meinem Tag?

Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus,

Keine Stelle auf der ich lebe

Alle Dinge, an die ich mich gebe,

Werden reich und geben mich aus.

"No ideas but in things," says William Carlos Williams; I dedicate these lines, then, to my old wristwatch, bought at a Roses discount store for $9.99 circa 1989/90, but now no longer wearable, alas, and running down its final battery. Ave atque vale.

Friday, September 4, 2026

The Flower beneath the Foot

And suddenly the Angel of Death passed by and the brilliant season waned.

—Ronald Firbank, The Flower beneath the Foot

Spare the brilliance of the season,

Somebody Something with your tricks.

America had good reason;

It still survives—is there to fix,

But must be scrapped if hope is dead.

What might be left if it were gone?

The sun shines brightly up ahead.

There's golf, you know, Somebody said,

Whatever else the sun shines on!

Don't look at us—our plan is sound;

We’ll have a shelter underground

And will get through the "coming crash."

When all else comes to grief, there’s cash!

Pity though the hopeful young

Who’ll never see their battle won;

Will never gaze on land and sea,

And sigh, “All this, maybe, was meant for me!”

Thursday, September 3, 2026

The Thingliness of Things

I lie in wait for what the morning brings

To trap it in this net of words.

However plaintively it sings,

No matter that it gasps for breath,

Attempting to insist: “I seem! I seem!”

In just a while, it will have been

And fade into the mis-en-scène,

Forgot, its music not now, then.

There is a thingliness in things,

A bookliness in books;

A phoniness in phones.

A deathliness in death?

That must inspire the beating wings.

See what I mean?

It is possible to love God

Because we don’t share a bathroom—

Except in a figurative sense—

Endure “Her” or “His” domestic fits,

“Their” snide remarks, what “They” resents.

It's otiose to call it quits!

Sunday, August 30, 2026