After Virtue

“It’s good to be faithful but it ain’t natural, as you knows.”

—John Berryman, Dream Songs, No. 142

Sufficient unto the day is the virtue thereof.

Say you have someone splendid to betray.

Niceness insufficient—you too feebly strive!

What's best is not the recommended way.

Things that struggle should yet harder strain.

There is the bit of business called “Alive":

One step forward, two steps back again.

What to do, then—still got half a brain?

Behind the bad we recognize, fate contrives

After virtue, vast, uncharted drives.

Despite our tribal socializing bent,

We act out a solipsistic temperament.

What to do, then, doing worth a damn?

“[E]ven god howled, ‘I am'” (quoting Berryman*).

*Dream Song No. 141.

Note: Aside from stealing its title, any allusion in this poem to Alasdair  MacIntyre’s book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) is entirely coincidental—I have yet to read it.

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Remembering

These ills ought you have expected?

Yes—or fled quickly to the skies.

[Te faudra-il ces maulx attendre ?

Ouy, ou tout vif aller ès cieulx.]

—François Villon, The Great Testament (1461)

What force pricks out the fragments that survive

And holds them there in limbo, alive,

For no reason easy to find out?

Memory’s a mad capricious thing:

You can’t recall things it won’t bring.

A secret hides in this no doubt:

Mind makes a comforting memorial

Of random scraps’ select tutorial:

We could not bear it if great All

Still had its former power to enthrall.

Memorial Day, 2025

Belle de Jour

Confused by too much reality,

la réalité des faits

—facts' factuality—the situation?

The Doomsday Clock's hands

stand at 89 seconds to midnight,

closer than they've ever been.*

You can buy the complete series at Amazon.

Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan save the world.†

Poets should celebrate flowers,

like the morning glory,

belle de jour, with its twining vines.

O my dreaming beauties of the night,

it's we ourselves have got us to this pass,

not knowing what we did—and do—alas.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and other former Manhattan Project scientists. During the Cold War, its Doomsday Clock stood at seven minutes to midnight.

*https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2025-statement/

†https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock_(comics)

Thursday, May 22, 2025