Just Right

“Who was that bear whose porridge is always just right? I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”—Wittgenstein

“Truth is provisional, time flows,

Where it comes from,

Where it goes,

No one knows,

Past and future live in our minds,

Depending on what the present finds,

The sun has spots, a leopard, too.

Commas are many. Full stops, few.”

All, or none, of this may be true—I can’t  tell.

Vive la bagatelle !

Sniffing the Region

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

—1 Corinthians 13 (KJV)

In Saint Paul’s great poem that is

1 Corinthians 13

we tinkling cymbals find quiet.

Art makers. Stafford says,* must be

responsive to where they happen

to be. That response is perhaps

charity. Or maybe it’s not.

(I've uncharitably forgot.)

*William Stafford, “Sniffing the Region,” in My Name is William Tell: Poems (Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1992).

Obit

“Of making many books there is no end.”

—Ecclesiastes 12:12 (ca. 970 BCE)

How long this vaunted progress now has been!

Our forebears did many ingenious things:

Calculated the Earth’s circumference

With only sticks and stones for evidence;

A clever Greek invented mayonnaise,

Improving lunch in the forthcoming days.

What’s it all amount to? Does it make sense,

Learning to swing a glaive to kill a queen?

Of all their cleverness, it would now seem,

None has been so little to their credit

As writing books to inform us of it.

King Solomon, three thousand years past,

Pronounced English literature’s obit.

Although supported by its boots, it falls.

Blurb

“Man, that’s Warm!!”*

—Iscariot Hackney, “Hot and Cool,” in Poet to Let (new ed., n.p., n.d.)

*Tip 'o the kepi to James Richardson. “Vectors 2.3,” no. 9, in Vectors: 6 & Ten-Second Essays (Copper Canyon Press, 2001): "no one exclaims delightedly 'Man, that's Warm!'"

 L0