Original Sin

—Say it, no ideas but in things—

William Carlos Williams

But likewise also say: No things but in ideas.

Grinning there at birth, those karmic dogs, old fears

That breach the bloody door where we come in,

Dr. Pelagius points to the poor red mewling thing,

“You mean you think that's full of Original Sin?”*

And circumcises the mite to set it right.

Time now to reconsider everything we thought;

We could be wrong! What was that stuff we bought?

The unacknowledged legislators, as Shelley said,

Of the world,* may in these after times find inspiration dead,

Or faint, or ill, or sorely gulled;

Hope's integument, whose plastic shield

leads power tools to yield.

(Dumb rhyme—it mocks the tongue-tied hierophant!)

How, then, to write poetry . . . when you can't?

* Randall Jarrell, Introduction to the Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams (New Directions paperback, 1969), ix.

** “. . . hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration . . . mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not. . . . Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry” (1821)

Sunday, August 24, 2025