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

Convivial Reminiscences

Luis Egidio Meléndez (1716–80), Still Life with Figs

Not warp'd by Passion, aw'd by Rumour,

Not grave thro' Pride, or Gay thro' Folly,

An equal Mixture of good Humour,

And sensible soft Melancholy.

—Pope

Try as I might, mistakes occur,

Although to virtue I defer.

A troubled heart succumbs as best

It can, and soft melancholy

Submits to humor's measured test:

Zeno refused many dinner invitations.

He liked to eat green figs lying in the sun.

I'd like that, too—if I had some!

What's more pointless than writing verse?

"We Poets are (upon a Poet's word)

Of all mankind, the creatures most absurd:"*

But yet, I guess, one might do worse!

Note: Alexander Pope's lines quoted in the epigraph referred to Henrietta Howard, countess of Suffolk (1681–1767). On the Stoic Zeno of Kition in Cyprus (335–265 BCE), who held that all men who are not wise must be mad, see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, citing the Convivial Reminiscences of Zeno's housemate (perhaps originally his slave) Persaeus, who became an important figure at the court of Antigonus II Gonatas in Macedonia.

*Pope, The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, 358–59.

Monday, February 16, 2026