Love: A Riddle

It’s the love of Marduk for Tiamat,

Of Xanthippē for Socrates,

Of Antony for Cleopatra,

Or Abelard for his Heloïse;

The love of Olive Oyl for Popeye

(Not Mexican Pete’s for Eskimo Nell!)

The hopeless love that knows full well

(Like Elon, squandering the sky).

It’s sui generis—hapax legómenon,

Here today, tomorrow gone,

Quite like those others. All the same,

You’d laugh if I conceded its real name.

Perhaps you'd smile yourself to sleep!

You must hoe, though, if you would reap.

Sunday, June 14, 2026

Other Beings

The Hotel De Aar, in the Great Karoo, South Africa, many years later . . .

Of other beings I have known

Most have been human, so it seems,

But quite a few were cats, one dog—

No, more. but only the one was "mine"—

And Hansie, that Karakul sheep.

All of these had names they went by.

There have been chickens, too, and some

Of them I killed, beheading them

With an axe, laughing as they ran

Headless in circles in the dust

Of that benighted yard. I was

Just a child. Does that absolve me?

I cannot count the spiders that I've

Known, never mind their insect ilk,

Or all of those whose flesh I ate—

"Forget all this, says Earth to the stars," Tom Sleigh writes, having in mind a war;

"old bones that shake when the winds roar."*

*Tom Sleigh, "Before Rain," in House of Fact. House of Ruin (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2018), 68.

Friday, June 12, 2026

The Seekers

Anything, that is, except a giant green wormhole.

—Ben Travers, IndieWire, May 22, 2026

Is there a land beyond despair?

They asked, who there had fled.

I wrote an answer with a trembling hand:

I'm sorry, I don't understand.

The rules have ever been unfair.

The plot if any's underhand.

Why not expect, just take as read,

The gormless message of the dead—

The hapless hosts who went before?

They, too, once trembled at the door

And in invisible ink

Left notes as to how not to think,

But how to empty out a brain

That’s always seeking to explain!

Thursday, June 11, 2026