Ménage

Loneliness, insomnia and I—
The strangest bedfellows you’ll ever see—
Toss off our sheets together and we try
Our best to keep each other company.

We pick the blankets from the floor. We find
Some satisifaction studying the shade:
Bright diagonals dance up one blind
As Fred and Ginger danced across the stage.

Nothing calms our restless legs. We kick
Phantom spiders tickling prickly feet;
We rub our soles and wait; but we can’t trick
Our senses. These sticks generate no heat.

Or nothing like that warmth I remember
Reaching for—half-dreaming—fingers blue,
Frozen, teeth chattering, ribcage tender,
Where I received an elbow from you.

When I Watch The Living Meet

Not much sleep last night. When I did manage to shut my eyes for a few minutes of agitated REM, I dreamt I was 20 again, and I was living inside A Shropshire Lad, by A.E. Housman.

This poem kept resounding in my head:


XII. When I watch the living meet


WHEN I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I lodge a little while,

If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong,
Let me mind the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.

In the nation that is not
Nothing stands that stood before;
There revenges are forgot,
And the hater hates no more;

Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.

Diffugere Nives

It is amazing what 10 hours of contiguous sleep can do for a person. I feel much better today than yesterday.

I am afraid I did have to skip Japanese class last night. I try never to do this. I think I may have missed 3 classes in the last 2 years. But I was a corpse last night, and starting to stink by the time I closed down my computer. So, I informed my classmates, and sensei, that I wouldn't be coming.

Instead, I bought bottle of cabernet and caught the 6:04 home. I had two glasses of wine, a grilled pork chop, a mountain of mashed potatoes, a chocolate rectangle (a brownie) and went to bed at 9:14 pm. I woke up this morning famished and refreshed at 7:10am.

How exciting my life is, it is difficult--even for me--to comprehend.

...

I have been very remiss lately in blogging about celestial events, and in recent days there have been several noteworthy items in the news. There has been this, and this, this, and today, this.

I did mention the article in the New York Times the other day detailing the end of the word--I mean world. At that time, I posted a preliminary appraisal of the event in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, which I took down a few hours after posting it because I re-read it, and it read like garbage.

So, here is a new version, dedicated to my friend Nancy, who is instrumental to mankind in many ways, not the least of which is helping me work out my poetic ideas.


The End of The World
For Nancy


If I were more convinced that God exists,
I’d probably have a quiet word with him:
According to the Astrophysicists,
The future of Manhattan’s looking grim.

A billion years from now, all the science
Suggests our friendly little sun will swell
Into a red, ill-tempered, gaseous giant,
Devouring my apartment—yours as well.

No mention how this will affect our rents:
This is a funny item to conceal.
Let’s find a lawyer: there are instruments
Available for renters to appeal

Lease changes. There is no apocalypse
A lengthy bit of litigation can’t eclipse.


...

Another thing I have been is poetically remiss. I have only posted one short fragment of our founder, A.E. Housman.

Here's a whole poem by Housman, a translation of Horace's "Diffugere Nives", "The Snows Are Fled Away", by one of the greatest classicists of the 20th century.

See you tomorrow!

Diffugere Nives

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

Parapluie

The weather today is actually not so bad in New York, in the 50s, but last night I had a difficult time getting to sleep. I think I only managed about an hour of solid slumber. And I am at work now, so I am feeling a bit obliterated.

Here is a vivid memory, a vain attempt to perk up my spirits.


Chanson de la Pluie

I said, “No thanks,” to Noah,
While crossing 14th Street;
He seemed to be selling umbrellas
Out standing in the sleet.

Most passersby ignored him:
He wore a puffy coat,
A golden clover pendant,
And he coughed, to clear his throat:

Unbrellas, unbrellas, unbrellas!
Unbrellas! He coughed again.
Unbrellas, unbrellas, unbrellas!
Unbrellas beat the rain!

Parade's End

One of the things I do, apart from writing poetry, or blogging, or studying Japanese, or day-dreaming, while I am at work, is legal research. Usually this is a pretty dull affair, consisting as it does of finding cases, legislation, past legislation, pending legislation, proposed legislation, pertinent legislation, peculiar legislation, articles, bill-jackets, treatises, SEC Filings, researching the legal history, and histrionics, of individuals, corporations or other entities duly constituted and incorporated in the U.S., Canada, the UK, EU, Mexico, Mongolia, Mars, the Lesser Magellanic Clouds, and M-31.

Most days I leave my desk at 5:30 with a hideous headache.

Even so. Beastly as these headaches sometimes are, collective life in the corporate cube is not all bad. You do have access to oxygen, elevators, emergency stairs, windows, computers, cafeterias, and highly corrosive coffee and tea. And sometimes you stumble across something curious in the course of your work. In one of the cases I was copying from the New York Law Journal this morning, I came across the surname: Tietjen. And for some reason, in the the back of my brain I heard a little bell tinkle. Where had I heard that name before?

...

Actually, there was no bell. In fact, if the truth be told (which it occasionally is in this blog), I knew exactly and instantaneously where I had heard that peculiar name, or at least an echo of it, before: Parade's End, by Ford Maddox Ford. I quote from Wiki:

Parade's End is a tetralogy (four related novels) by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. It is set in England and on the Western Front in World War I, where Ford served as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, a life vividly depicted in the novels.

The novel chronicles the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory," a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy land-owning family who is serving in the British Army during World War I. Tietjens may or may not be the father of the child of his wife, Sylvia, a flippant socialite who seems intent on ruining him. Meanwhile, Tietjens' incipient affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited suffragette, has not been consummated, despite what all their friends believe. Much of the novel is spent following Tietjens in French trenches as he ruminates on how to be a better soldier and untangle his strange social life.

...

"Much of the novel is spent following Tiejens in French trenches as he ruminates on how to be a better soldier and untangle his strange social life."

I work in an office, and I know very little about the trenches of France, only what I have read in the work of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but I do know something about entanglements. I wake up with knots in my shoulders all the time. Still, I wonder if it is wise to conceive of life in general, or your life in particular, as a novel--or worse, a poem--even from the safe and sanitary distance of Art?

What happens if you want to put your goddam book down and just get some sleep?