Biodegradable Souls

Peccavi

Latin: "I have sinned."

When he was young, he did small wicked foolish things

That burden him now, sixty years later,

Although the world might consider them merely venial—

Commonplace, of scant importance.

If he could change one thing, these he'd undo.

But they’ll haunt him till the end of his days, spilt milk,

Unless he embrace the one and only solution

He can perceive, through the anguish of that old guilt,

And beg forgiveness for all the sins of others, too.

Poor Me!

Much of her memory’s a work of fiction—

The novelistic genre called “Poor Me!”

More poignant than postmodernism (though not, perhaps, "post-post")

Its romans à clef depict the past as toast,

Assigning to a junk room family oubliette

Countless bites and pieces one’d rather now forget!

Reality

This is the real world:

The mogul in his mansion

Paid for by domestic munitions,

The bomber at his bombsight

The Nazi in his tank;

The bacon-eating billions,

Whose "human, all-too-human," biodegradable souls, unthinking

Savour the fruit of untold animal suffering,

Oblivious of our sacred sapient task—

These must, alas, all be forgiven, too?

O God of myriad gods, but it’s a lot to ask!

Alexander Aguin, Plyushkin, an illustration for Nikolai Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls—a character whose name in Russia is a metaphor for compulsive hoarding.

In Arcadia

Tomorrow we’ll boil acorns instead of cabbage

to treat our hangovers.

—Nikocharēs (Old Comedy playwright and poet, Athens, d. 345 BCE)

Upon the road from Megalopolis

—big city—in Arcadia, we paused

awhile at Mount Mainalo (depicted)

where anciently the good spirit

Agathodaimon was worshipped

by humble acorn eaters, who

—as a Delphic oracle'd predicted—

once stopped the macho Spartans

dead in their ferocious tracks.

But what of the daimon back

cover hovering in the blinding dark

that writes what seems to be poetry

—though all too often in phrases

so indistinct that I can barely see!

—does it actually, for real, exist [he, she?],

in some hyper "quantum" superconscious

cloud? I wonder . . . hung over yet again

by images off the Web, whose poignant

speech impinges on the heart

with its electronic hook or crook.

The only hangover cure there is, I fear,

is not from any online thing or book

or source in a bubbling Chinese spring:

it's boiling acorns, as Nikocharēs

recommended, when Hell's confounded demons sing.

Jing'an Temple and West Nanjing Road, formerly known as Bubbling

Spring Road, in Shanghai's International Settlement

Note: Aristotle says in his Poetics (ca. 335 BCE) that Nikocharēs wrote a parody of Homer's Iliad titled the Diliad, or Deiliad (Δειλιάς < δειλία: “cowardice”), now unfortunately lost.

Saturday, January 18, 2025

Lost Cities

I saw in my dream.

the great lost cities, Macchu Picchu, Cambridge Mass, Angkor . . .

—John Berryman, The Dream Songs, No. 197

Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.—Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

My own lost cities are many! Here are a few for those who haven’t any:

Cape Town, where, in Khayelitsha,

four hundred thousand people make new homes

and some on occasion stone a passing car.

London, where the undeserving poor revile the undeserving rich

Though both alike lust for the same undeserving bitch.

Athens, where the weight of history often groans

So loud Greeks cannot hear their phones.

Berkeley, where I copyedited a myriad academic tomes,

Only in the end to be drop-kicked by gnomes.

(If this handful don't in themselves suffice,

add the lost city where you are right now for spice.)

Friday, January 17, 2025