Good Friday

The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed, / And the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead.—W H. Auden

Why are so many poets vegetarians?

You might well ask!

It’s since they scan what’s what

—their special task.

The maudlin multitude do not,

who’ll sigh one day at scrutable positions—

a school in store for every solemn sot.

And if they enquire what a poem means,

answer: "What do you suppose it seems?"

We write, not what we think, but what impinges

on pious minds, past bone and pervious meninges.

The meninges: dura mater, arachnoid, and pia mater (Wikipedia)

Addendum

The ilium, ischium, and os innominatum

—that nameless bone!

conspire to keep me still in bed—

Muggs, the cat, has been fed.

O frabjous day! Nothing to do,

nowhere to go, but stay home

listen to music on WTJU,

enumerate my antique flirts—

nothing there that specially hurts.

Epigraph: W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening” (1937)

Friday, April 18, 2025