Curfew

Que voulez-vous la porte était gardée—Paul Éluard, « Couvre-feu » (1942)

I

What matters it if the gate be guarded

By curfew sheltering stammered cant,

I fashion this from remembered lingo,

It's words that fleet for cover in my mind,

Dislodged from their long familiar places,

Like old friends leaving their shadows behind,

Forgotten words that hide for a moment,

Then pop up again to show their faces

Unbidden, from the blind to which they went.

Those friends are gone, alas, for good. They’re dead.

II

What matters it if the gate be guarded,

Where curfew conceals vocabulary?

I fashion this poem from words recalled,

Though others flit for cover through my mind,

Absent from their long familiar places

Like old friends leaving their shadow behind.

Words forgotten scarper—I admit it—

But then show up, with dutiful faces,

Unbidden, from the blind to which they’d fled.

Those friends are gone for good, they're beastly dead.

Petra, Mytilene (Lesbos), 1966: Peter Rorich, Rab Shiell, Alexander Marais du Toit, and Michael von Lilienstein Tapscott, with the writer, PRD, on the right, the sole survivor of this group today. Photo by John Berryman.

Needless to say, Paul Éluard wrote of an entirely different sort of curfew in his famous poem, which inspired a generation in France.

Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Dwell not too much on that which no one knows!

Lines riffing on "Denk nicht zuviel von dem was keiner weiss!" by Stefan George, in Der Stern des Bundes ("The Star of the Covenant") (1914)

Dwell not too much on that which no one knows!

Life's pictured sense is inexplicable.

The wild swan shot and in the courtyard kept

Awhile, nursing a useless crippled wing,

Evoked—you said—some related thing:

Old kin of yours, or long-forgotten pet.

No fudged ressentiment or gratitude

For your care it ever showed. . . The end came

Quickly, and its fading eye rebuked

That last intrusion in the thingly game.

Envoi

Thingly's a term of art.

Res ipsa loquitur.

The poet tethered to the cart,

God only knows what may occur!

Cover image: Jan Asselijn, The Threatened Swan (De bedreigde zwaan), oil on canvas (1650), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Sunday, April 13, 2025

In Doubt We Trust

“It’s certainty that makes one mad, not doubt.”―Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

A hae ma doots! * And well I might

—necessity has doubt in sight;

I doubt myself, I doubt the times,

and soon will doubt these doubtful lines.

I doubt even my doubting, too:

self-doubt is always near about,

for like unto the green bay tree.

the irradicable wicked† flout

the quick and doubt the absent dead.

Neutrinos, archaea, ants, and apes,

the Alps, the Nile, the Milky Way,

Higgs' boson, ipse dixit, if I may,

though fleeting and not here to stay,

reflect—if not entirely, well and true,

questioned by the likes of you

—on physics' famous undead cat.

Epigraph: Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: “Nicht der Zweifel, die Gewißheit ist das, was wahnsinnig macht.”

* “I have my doubts,” Scottish expression of skepticism.

† "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree."—Psalm 37:35 (King James Version).

Thursday, April 10, 2025