Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
—Ezra Pound
No hummingbird or flutterby flits through the icy air,
And in the sodden underbrush few questing rodents fare.
Carpenter bees may presently craft burrows in the deck,
Butterflies abound in the abelia,
While squirrels bury acorns, forgetting where.
All that might one day be. Not yet.
Now of the celebrities I’ve met
Most are dead—and, worse, forgotten.
They lacked, it seems, what wiseacres once called “bottom.”*
Oblivious of vainglorious doings in DC,
and humanity going wholesale to the dogs,
with no notion of the apocalypse of the literati,
or the impending doom of poetry,
Autochthons in a comfortable coma
invest humanity's fate in cryptocurrency.
You may not readily deduce from these remarks that I’m a pessimist.
If so, I pray you, sirs and madams, do desist!
*For this usage, see https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2020/11/bottom.html, e.g.: “Although the savages [Amerindians] held out and, as the phrase is, had better bottoms, yet, for a spurt, the Englishmen were more nimble and speedy”—Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature (1774).
January 22, 2025
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