Shelf Life

I am consumed by delusions of grandeur
I’m fallen prey to the beautiful girl
I have seen romance in the obvious quarters
And I have painted myself into that world

I have constructed my own personal Babel
But many passages remain out of print
Leaving me in an unresolved sentence
Without an idea of where it went

I have developed an unnatural candour
In contradiction to all I hold dear
I think of myself as tall and silent
This little voice is all that I hear

Now the night’s drawing in
I’m your unworthy friend
At the untimely end of a lifetime

Thinking I might hold on to my first marriage
I learned the language of the self obsessed
It was only later at the post-grad parties
That it rewarded me with great success

No longer waiting for my prayers to be answered
No longer waiting for my publisher’s call
No longer charming in my reminiscence
Only immersed in a faint afterglow

Now the night’s drawing in
I’m your unworthy friend
At the ungodly end of a lifetime

Yet ha’e I Silence left, the croon o’ a’.

No’ her, wha on the hills langsyne I saw
Liftin’ a foreheid o’ perpetual snaw.

No’ her, wha in the how-dumb-deid o’ nicht
Kyths, like Eternity in Time’s despite.

No’ her, withooten shape, wha’s name is Daith,
No’ Him, unkennable abies to faith

—God whom, gin e’er He saw a man, ’ud be
E’en mair dumfooner’d at the sicht than he

—But Him, whom nocht in man or Deity,
Or Daith or Dreid or Laneliness can touch,  
Wha’s deed owre often and has seen owre much.

O I ha’e Silence left

                               —‘And weel ye micht,’
Sae Jean’ll say, ‘efter sic a nicht!’

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted
In the distraction of this madding fever!
O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruin’d love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuked to my content
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.

—Now let me tell you why I said that.
Try to put yourself into an experimental mood.
Stop right here and try to review everything
you felt about that line. Did you accept it
as wisdom? as perception? as a gem, maybe,
for your private anthology of Telling Truths?

My point is that the line is fraudulent.
A blurb. It is also relevant that I know
at least a dozen devoutly intellectual
journals that will gladly buy any fourteen
such lines plus a tinny rhyme scheme and
compound the felony by calling that a sonnet.

—Very well, then, I am a cynic. Though, for
the record, let me add that I am a cynic with
one wife, three children, and other invest-
ments. Whoever heard of a cynic carrying a
pack for the fun of it? It won’t really do
I’m something else.
Were I to dramatize myself,
I’d say I am a theologian who keeps meeting
the devil as a master of make-up, and that
among his favorite impersonations he appears,
often as not, as the avuncular old ham who winks,
tugs his ear, and utters such gnomic garbage
as: “Nothing is really hard but to be real.”

I guess what the devil gets out of this—if he is
the fool he seems to be—is the illusion of
imitating heaven. If, on the other hand, he is no
fool, then his deceptions are carefully practiced
and we are all damned. For all of us, unless
we are carefully warned, will accept such noises
as examples of the sound an actual mind makes.

Why arc we damned then?—I am glad you asked that.
It is, as we say to flatter oafs, a good question.
(Meaning, usually, the one we were fishing for. Good.)
In any case. I may now pretend to think out the answer
I have memorized:
We are damned for accepting as
the sound a man makes, the sound of something else,
thereby losing the truth of our own sound.

How do we
learn our own sound? (Another good question. Thank you.)
—by listening to what men there have been and are
—by reading more poets than jurists (without scorning
Law)—and by reading what we read not for its
oration, but for its resemblance to that sound in which
we best hear most of what a man is. Get that sound into
your heads and you will know what tones to exclude.

—if there is enough exclusion in you to keep the
pie plates out of the cymbals, the tin horns out of
the brass section, the baling wire out of the strings,
and thereby to let the notes roll full to the ear
that has listened enough to be a listener.

As for the devil—when he has finished every imp-
ersonation, the best he will have been able to accomplish
is only that sound which is exactly not the music.

The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s,
Is–not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,–but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means: a very different thing!

When I was young and bold and strong,
Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!
My plume on high, my flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
“Come out, your dogs, and fight!” said I,
And wept there was but once to die.

But I am old; and good and bad
Are woven in a crazy plaid
I sit and say, “The world is so;
And he is wise who lets it go.
A battle lost, a battle won–
The difference is small, my son.”

Inertia rides and riddles me;
The which is called philosophy.

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku’s name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

By Rihaku       

No, lady, the foregoing poem is neither

a riddle nor a rebus.  Nothing to be guessed.

When it says, “It has no name,” it means just that.

No, not “grace,” “vision,” “caritas,”

or some exuberant, all-embracing, new,

exhilarating virtue that God and I

have just concocted.

Look, read the thing again, taking it literally.

You are handicapped by thinking of me as having

some eldritch pact with words.  Whereas—

groping drop-out from night school,

lifelong at odds with them for their chicanery and despotism—

I consort with words only from sheer loneliness,

as a lifer in solitary might welcome

the companionship of a spider or a cockroach.

          Listen…

No, that is asking too much…