January 2015
I live near Boston and teach philosophy at Boston University. Besides academic pieces, I write fiction (when I’m up to it) and poems (when I can’t help it). I use a fountain pen—my link to tradition—and write to music. I’ve published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals. A new story collection, Heiberg’s Twitch, is forthcoming.
In January
The celebrated relativity of time
we may grasp, but who knows time? To feel it
requires some space, to believe it you have
to move. All the most essential trees are
known solely by their fruits, from mother’s love
to the Big Bang. Festooned between bright
effect and hazy cause is, I suppose, faith.
This long empty afternoon is empty
because it’s long, long because it’s empty.
Pencil colored, chilly, opaque, pointless,
more an engraving of an afternoon.
My sister likes to insist that Everything
Happens For A Reason. She means, of course,
a good reason. Wrapped in this quilt she’s snug
enough, proof against all chilly, merely
apparent evils. The only faith she needs
is in a weird roulette that spins for her:
Providence. No Stoic ever claimed that
fatalism must be disconsolate.
Science is an activity pursued
part time by scientists. At their conferences
none proclaims that what they all believe
is real is not all of reality
to any of them, that even chemists crave
luxuries, comforts, lust for warmth. Who’d choose
to be a crow on a wet black branch
in January, aware of nothing but one’s
needs and hardly of their satisfaction,
just to know all the reasons that aren’t good?
Being is wanting; there’s an axiom,
first principle beyond disproof. Being
isn’t having. Who wants to be and not have?
The cracker crumbs I spread across the gray
snow this morning draw from the gray sky,
down the gray air, black birds. Sharp heads hammer
greedily, squamate feet dance daintily
across the crust. For these the afternoon
has been neither long nor empty, nothing
happened for a good reason, and night,
blacker and colder, neither too empty
nor too long, will arrive just in time.
In January first appeared in The Literary Review
Under the Pavement, The Beach — Paris 1968
Certain we were the People, not a mob,
that the streets belonged to us, we surged,
the city’s young blood bright red with zeal,
swarmed through the broad boulevards intent
on hammering each straight and rigid line
into the shape of a dancer's thigh or a
post-adolescent breast. How could the
bureaux and the banks resist a million
mouths raging for liberty and pleasure?
So we tore up everything that was tearable,
from toothpaste ads to frangible asphalt,
tossed it all skywards, glasswards,
policewards, parentwards, Godwards.
The old needed to be shoved aside and yield
us what we yearned for, endless August in utopia.
Sure, we were foolish, drunk and callow, but so alive.
We plastered the city with mottos of preposterous politics.
Reins to the children, guns to the Seine.
You have your money—we, our hair.
Raise high the guillotine of love!
Beneath your filthy pavement, the clean beach.
These we sang out, chanting each to each,
raising fists and voices, strong just from taking part.
Those silly sidewalk slogans can still touch the heart,
naïve poems, fiercely unresigned and unalloyed.
Is it just as well we failed, grew older, and employed?
Not Really a Eulogy
His improvisatory life, all the mocking masks, the put-ons,
failed to end like the musical comedy he strove to make it;
it’s as if some bloody-minded terrorist burst into
the theater and blew up a performance of The Ideal Husband.
Tap-dancing through forty years, chuckling
even at the least opportune of opportunities,
he cracked jokes as old and sugary as the
leftover Hallowe’en candy bars he kept by
the door to disconcert those visitors
he called grown-ups in the worst sense.
His eulogy ought to be from Aristophanes, epitaph by Shaw.
At Oxford, his aristocratic looks led the Brits
to imagine he was a Kennedy. When they
asked he’d smile slyly and say, “No comment.”
I wonder, might that be his ideal epitaph?
Only a minor infection of the calf, but they issued him
the wrong antibiotic. So down crashed the curtain
too soon, smack in the middle of the second act.
The celebrated relativity of time
we may grasp, but who knows time? To feel it
requires some space, to believe it you have
to move. All the most essential trees are
known solely by their fruits, from mother’s love
to the Big Bang. Festooned between bright
effect and hazy cause is, I suppose, faith.
This long empty afternoon is empty
because it’s long, long because it’s empty.
Pencil colored, chilly, opaque, pointless,
more an engraving of an afternoon.
My sister likes to insist that Everything
Happens For A Reason. She means, of course,
a good reason. Wrapped in this quilt she’s snug
enough, proof against all chilly, merely
apparent evils. The only faith she needs
is in a weird roulette that spins for her:
Providence. No Stoic ever claimed that
fatalism must be disconsolate.
Science is an activity pursued
part time by scientists. At their conferences
none proclaims that what they all believe
is real is not all of reality
to any of them, that even chemists crave
luxuries, comforts, lust for warmth. Who’d choose
to be a crow on a wet black branch
in January, aware of nothing but one’s
needs and hardly of their satisfaction,
just to know all the reasons that aren’t good?
Being is wanting; there’s an axiom,
first principle beyond disproof. Being
isn’t having. Who wants to be and not have?
The cracker crumbs I spread across the gray
snow this morning draw from the gray sky,
down the gray air, black birds. Sharp heads hammer
greedily, squamate feet dance daintily
across the crust. For these the afternoon
has been neither long nor empty, nothing
happened for a good reason, and night,
blacker and colder, neither too empty
nor too long, will arrive just in time.
In January first appeared in The Literary Review
Under the Pavement, The Beach — Paris 1968
Certain we were the People, not a mob,
that the streets belonged to us, we surged,
the city’s young blood bright red with zeal,
swarmed through the broad boulevards intent
on hammering each straight and rigid line
into the shape of a dancer's thigh or a
post-adolescent breast. How could the
bureaux and the banks resist a million
mouths raging for liberty and pleasure?
So we tore up everything that was tearable,
from toothpaste ads to frangible asphalt,
tossed it all skywards, glasswards,
policewards, parentwards, Godwards.
The old needed to be shoved aside and yield
us what we yearned for, endless August in utopia.
Sure, we were foolish, drunk and callow, but so alive.
We plastered the city with mottos of preposterous politics.
Reins to the children, guns to the Seine.
You have your money—we, our hair.
Raise high the guillotine of love!
Beneath your filthy pavement, the clean beach.
These we sang out, chanting each to each,
raising fists and voices, strong just from taking part.
Those silly sidewalk slogans can still touch the heart,
naïve poems, fiercely unresigned and unalloyed.
Is it just as well we failed, grew older, and employed?
Not Really a Eulogy
His improvisatory life, all the mocking masks, the put-ons,
failed to end like the musical comedy he strove to make it;
it’s as if some bloody-minded terrorist burst into
the theater and blew up a performance of The Ideal Husband.
Tap-dancing through forty years, chuckling
even at the least opportune of opportunities,
he cracked jokes as old and sugary as the
leftover Hallowe’en candy bars he kept by
the door to disconcert those visitors
he called grown-ups in the worst sense.
His eulogy ought to be from Aristophanes, epitaph by Shaw.
At Oxford, his aristocratic looks led the Brits
to imagine he was a Kennedy. When they
asked he’d smile slyly and say, “No comment.”
I wonder, might that be his ideal epitaph?
Only a minor infection of the calf, but they issued him
the wrong antibiotic. So down crashed the curtain
too soon, smack in the middle of the second act.
©2014 Robert Wexelblatt