Table d'hôte

Chaïm Soutine, The Table (ca. 1923), oil on canvas. Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris

Every angel is terrible.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, No. 1

200 billion vertebrates

Die every year to feed us;

I wonder if they think their lives

Are worth our human fuss.

Before they die, they suffer,

Confined to cruel spaces;

The last thing they live to see

Are killers’ human faces.

Okay, I’m writing doggerel—

It's lingua franca time!

Yahweh's sunk in holy dotage,

Something to do is whine.

At this late stage of mythic rage,

Despairing angels drivel.

Monday, April 21, 2025

Good and Clever

If all the good people were clever,

    And all clever people were good,

The world would be nicer than ever

   We thought that it possibly could,

—Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth  (1931)

The good all thought they were clever.

The clever all thought they were good.

The handcart to Hell—forever—

Sped on, as I knew that it would!

Sunday, April 20, 2025

Good Friday

The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed, / And the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead.—W H. Auden

Why are so many poets vegetarians?

You might well ask!

It’s since they scan what’s what

—their special task.

The maudlin multitude do not,

who’ll sigh one day at scrutable positions—

a school in store for every solemn sot.

And if they enquire what a poem means,

answer: "What do you suppose it seems?"

We write, not what we think, but what impinges

on pious minds, past bone and pervious meninges.

The meninges: dura mater, arachnoid, and pia mater (Wikipedia)

Addendum

The ilium, ischium, and os innominatum

—that nameless bone!

conspire to keep me still in bed—

Muggs, the cat, has been fed.

O frabjous day! Nothing to do,

nowhere to go, but stay home

listen to music on WTJU,

enumerate my antique flirts—

nothing there that specially hurts.

Epigraph: W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening” (1937)

Friday, April 18, 2025