Holy Moly!

In memoriam Michael von Lilienstein Tapscott

"Holy Moly!" exclaimed the DC

Comics hero Captain Marvel.

At which, in our Upper Montague

Street flat in Marylebone in 1963,

we laughed—Marijke, I, and you,

Michael—with joy at the foolery

of our—was it bygone?—youth.

“At its root it was was black,

but its flower was as white as milk: /

Moly is what the gods call it:

it’s hard for mortal men /

to dig up; but the gods can do what-

ever they’ve a mind to,” Homer says.*

It was only in 394 CE, I think, when Theodosius closed the temples

—although Athena's great statue

stood in the Parthenon bereft

another century†—that those

old gods may have ceased to be.

Or are they with us yet?

SHAZAM! Just in another guise?

*Odyssey 10: 304-6, translated by Peter Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), p. 162. Italics added.

†Until 487 CE.

Monday, February 10, 2025

No, seriously!

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Smyrne Bornabat. 1873. Oil on paper, 15 x 21 cm (5.9 x 8.2 in). Private collection.

“What good's an art, said Corot, who whistled continually while he painted, what good's an art that doesn't make you happy?"

—Alexandre Dumas fils, “Letter to His Father"*

"Corot painted three thousand canvases. Ten thousand of them were sold in America,"

a curator at the Louvre quipped.

"I have only one goal in life: to make landscapes," Corot said.

He begged his mother for permission to dine out every other Friday.

Hopping on one foot, or two, and contented with his luck, he sang bits of opera and whistled while he worked.

Like Corot with his paysages

so I am with my poetry.

As happy artists, we, too, chérie,

could be buried in Père Lachaise along with Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Edith Piaf, and many another celebrity.

Fans from all over the world visiting our graves might shed a furtive tear!

Sound like a plan?

No, seriously!

Michel-Léonard Béguine, Camille Corot (1899). Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

*“Qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un art, disait Corot qui sifflotait sans cesse en peignant, qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un art qui ne rend pas gai?”--Alexandre Dumas fils, “Lettre à son père.”

Sunday, February 6, 2025

Truth

“Truth is like fire; to tell the truth means to glow and burn.”

—Gustav Klimt, Nuda Veritas (1899)

Truth, I'd say, is more like a foxed mirror

In a dusty, cluttered attic corner

Of an imagined ancestral homeland—

A beaten country that lost its Great War.

Or like a painting of a nonentity called “Me”

Who slinks around a corner in the Goodwill store,

And then (hopefully?) is spotted no more.

Its kindling might get clearer by and by,

It is the flames one cannot falsify.

Telling is—inevitably, I guess!—to lie.

Saturday, February 8, 2025