The Ambush

Rock painting called The Holy Ghost and His Companions, Horseshoe Canyon, Utah

There’s a God lying in wait in everyone’s life. / Tout homme a dans sa vie un Dieu à l’affût.—François Mauriac

What master would a godling serve,

Bushwacked the Lord's befuddled lambs

In saddened swamps and bloodied burg,

When Serapis unscarfs his scams?

If Hades sics the dogs-in-law,

A toxic cloud will rush before

That's black enough to dim the light

And quite oblivious of right.

Plaguer in the Paraclete's place,

Graupel smirching the Pergula,

For the grievèd Golden Ruler,

The big Assumption is Disgrace.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-analysis-suggests-utahs-famous-rock-art-surprisingly-recent-180952482/

Cerberus, the three-headed dog of Hell, with Hercules and Mercury, in a Roman tomb mosaic.

Saturday, November 23, 2024

Comedy

La vie serait une comédie bien agréable, si l’on n’y jouait pas un rôle. / Life would make great theater, were it not that one plays a role in it.—Denis Diderot (1713–84)

My own role in it is not to shoot the seagull

Or chop down the orchard, Chekhov said.

I get a thousand roubles for a play is all.

And something tells me that I’ll soon be dead.

I, too, play a subsidiary role—"the poet."

No one gives a tinker's dam(n) for what I think.

I do my best to make the viewers blink,

But there's no future in it, don’t I know't!

November 18, 2024

Seeming and Savour

Ruta graveolens, rue, herb-of-grace . . .

“A poet can be intelligent . . . yet he walks, half-balmy and over-armored . . . by his amnesia, ignorance  and education.”—Robert Lowell, "Afterthought" in Notebook (3d ed., 1970)

1.      Amnesia

Thank God we forget

2.      Ignorance

And know so little

3.      Education

Though we learned so much.

Lost memories, threatened time,

Rue averts the evil eye

Displacing all along the line,

Savour and seeming, summer's lie,

En route to amnesia's bland sea

And drifts of immemorial snow

Banked up fled centuries ago.

Is this, though, where I wish to be?

Passing through like all of you,

I picked some sonnets for my shield,

Escutcheon of the dearest dead,

Whom best to trust, ancestral true.

When those parting words were said,

Rue, though bitter, they annealed.

Envoi

For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep

Seeming and savour all the winter long.

—Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, act 4, scene 4