Fall

The Mississippi River downstream from the Washington Avenue Bridge, Minneapolis

“Fall comes to us as a prize

To rouse us toward our fate.”

—John Berryman, Dream Song no. 385

Berryman’s Dream Songs used to puzzle me.

Why would the man write such stuff?

And think it poetry? Then I got it.

They aren’t so much poems as suicide notes,

All three hundred and eighty-five of them,

Him striving to get the wording right before plunging off that bridge.

“Fall is grievy, brisk,” he said,

"and empty grows every bed."†

For my part—quoting Stendhal,

alongside other obiter dicta—

I hang in here out of political curiosity:

What'll the crazy dickheads do next this fall?

Whether or not these lines make poetry,

You'll get no suicide notes from me!

†Berryman, Dream Songs, nos. 385 and 1.

Thanksgiving, November 28, 2024

The Serpent and the File: A Fable

Boomslang photographed near Botrivier, Western Cape, South Africa

After La Fontaine

In a time yet to be, when the art of writing and the alphabet had long been lost,

A coronal mass ejection from the sun wiping out the Internet

Irreparably, all knowledge left was encoded in the memories

Of human beings otherwise good for nothing, called “Files.”

The Sixth Mass Extinction had

Left scant nonhuman animal life on Earth.

Of snakes only a single species suvived

Dispholidus typus, the Boomslang,

Of which a single individual

In a sudden burst of speciation had evolved intelligence of a superior kind—such things are inevitable,

The zoötic cosmological principle teaches,

Once life has begun on a planet circling its sun.

They must be what God—or the Universe—intends.

A tree remaining in Africa from which this wise Boomslang hung

Contemplating the nature of things,

Like Aristotle or La Boétie,

A memorious old File

Muttering the facts that were his raison d’être

Happened to pass beneath

And seeing the serpent on the bough

Seized it in his teeth and bit down viciously .

“Ah,” said the snake, “poor foolish File,

What do you seek to do?

Destroy that which is so much wiser than you?

All you wretched creatures know

Is how to remember and how to bite!”*

So saying, sadly, it died:

Intelligence would perforce await

Another aeon to delight.

*Ceci s’adresse à vous, esprits du dernier ordre,

Qui n’étant bons à rien cherchez sur tout à mordre.

Vous vous tourmentez vainement.

Croyez-vous que vos dents impriment leurs outrages

Sur tant de beaux ouvrages ?

—Jean de La Fontaine, “Le serpent et la lime” (1668)

For the full text of La Fontaine's fable, see: https://www.poesie-francaise.fr/jean-de-la-fontaine/fable-le-serpent-et-la-lime.php.

Behold

Jonas Lie, The Black Teapot (1911), detail. Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York

. . . nὰ ποὺ ὁ μέγας Θάνατος μοῦ γίνηκε ἀδερφός!—Sikelianos

Because I trusted my gut and lauded Earth,

Held back in flight my secret pinions’ strain,

And rooted mindfulness in willing dearth,

The dancing spring, live source of holy worth,

Revived to quench my thirst again …

Because I never figured out the when or how,

But plunged my mind into each passing call

As though it with eternity were allied,

Whether in summer plenitude or winter squall,

The monad sphere gleams like a berry now.

Rain falls from heaven and the fruit’s inside!

Because, instead of “Life starts, then ends,”

I said: “After a rainy day, light bends

More richly; earthquakes bolster up the sky;

Earth’s secret living pulse tells why,”

Great Death Himself’s become my brother.

“All that’s solid melts into air” [said Marx’s mother].

Epigraph: “ . . . Great Death Himself’s become my brother.”—Angelos Sikelianos, «Γιατὶ βαθιά μου δόξασα ["Because in my depths I praised"]», imitated from Sikelianos's Greek by PRD, https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/because-i-trusted-my-gut/?print=print.