Dejection

Basso continuo

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

       A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief . . .

—Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode”

Were it but that, I would prefer some pang,

I might suppose if I were still deceived

By songs that in the old days once were sung,

Knowing myself, who unwisely believed

The fantasies of that heroic gang

With whom when younger I interred my bet,

But having learned: The unwise are all mad,

And its painful corollary regret:

Those who do no good may be viewed as bad,

Ask what’s the point conceding anything?

Yelp all you like, there’s nothing to be had,

Much though we ought to make the welkin ring!

 Note: “welkin” = the sky, heaven, cf. German Wolken, clouds. King Richard to his troops, Bosworth Field, August 22, 1485: “Amaze the welkin with your broken staves!” (Shakespeare, Richard III, 5.3.432).

Monday, February 22, 2026

Banana Republican

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

—Anon.

A child contrived of Moctezuma and Nell Gwyn

(if not of Pocahontas and Ben Franklin)

in a fit of noncommittal I was born.

My genealogy at best is dim.

What's it to me if Dad were Cicero ("Chickpea")?

Bliss to be alive in that refulgent dawn,

already as an infant, and evolving spawn,

I shot my favorite spores as far as I could reach:

O hemispheric mycelium, mould of the free!

From Gulf of Trump to Patagonia's freezing beach,

'shroom 'publics sprang up, from sea to shining sea,

each with its patriotic banner

and presidential particolored sash,

a vaunted history, a torrid solipsistic manner,

basting its bombastic brats with nepotistic cash.

Back of them all, inevitably, the Big Banana.

Message to be found washed up in a plastic bottle in the former Costa Rica, ca. 3,000 CE.

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