The Half-Known Life

. . . in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.—Melville, Moby Dick

Ah, but that appalling ocean more than ever appalls,

and Tahiti is not what it was when Bougainville arrived aboard the sulky Boudeuse,

en route to fame by way of Bougainvillea,*

followed presently by Yankee whalers, missionaries,

venereal disease, Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin, and nuclear fallout—

France exploded 193 atomic devices on atolls there between 1966 and 1996;

290 warheads being the Fifth Republic’s harvest for its Force de Frappe . . .

Of course that’s nothing compared to what we Americans got up to!

Though life itself may be,

you can’t really say, Herman, that its horrors are half-known:

Ahab’s peg leg was sawed from whalebone.

That ruined paradise lives on in every soul.

Belial set it there—it is, maybe, a kind of demigoal.

*Bougainvillea was actually discovered in South America, very likely by Jeanne Baret, who circumnavigated the world with Bougainville’s expedition disguised as a man. It should perhaps rather have been called Baretia! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Baret.

Tuesday, August 4, 2026—but this was written years ago!

Haruspex

The liver, old Babylonians believed,

Is the seat of love and passion;

Baʿal's acolytes were not deceived

When in their atrabilious fashion,

They groped in a mantic victim's giblets,

Among the roiling innards tracked its role,

Bypassing noisy heart and calculating brain,

And in the deep end of the belly's pool

Sought out the seepage of our sappy strain:

The medulla oblongata and the vagus nerve

May do their bit, and for transmission serve,

But it's from the viscera we get our verve—

The flighty feeling and the je ne sais quoi

That hurries heroes to a last hurrah,

When human hopes are mostly best regards,

Au fond, a schmear of pâté de foie gras.

Thursday, July 30, 2026

A Visit to the Vet

Yes, these animals that we come to love,

Already listening for the sound of when,

Wait patiently for the next human move.

They have no notion of the now and then.

A passing visit to the friendly vet,

A needle's pricking and the final minute.

There are no memories to forget.

They lack all concept of a now and then.

This is their world and we are in it,

Already listening for the sound of when.

P.S. Not to worry—Muggs is fine! Visits to the vet are referenced generically in these lines.

Wednesday, July 29, 2026