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
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