Notebook, September 12, 2025

If Wallace Stevens was my neighbor
I’d bring him a glass doorknob
If Walt Whitman was my neighbor
I’d bring him fresh hay for his pony

I am fond of the term “up river”
As a child I lived beside a river
Imaginary crows, real ones—
What luck! Here comes one
That will walk on my grave!

**
Lots of hate in my country
Would that I could talk with the pros
Marlowe, Shakespeare
Sun coming up

**

Did you know your parents were crazy?
Yes
Did you try to please them anyway?
Yes
Are you still trying to please them
Though they’re dead?
Yes
It’s late in the fourth quarter fella…

**

Sometimes I read self-help books
Then I read Wittgenstein
Since no one knows what the self is
Who am I really helping
Death of course
But Ludwig says death
Doesn’t exist
So I’m a dented Buddha

**
If Wallace Stevens was my neighbor
I’d bring him a glass doorknob
If Walt Whitman was my neighbor
I’d bring him fresh hay for his pony
If Emily Dickinson was my neighbor
I would never knock on her door
The heart has many mansions—
To paraphrase Jesus

**

I used to like the big heavy telephones
You could kill somebody with those things
Ma Bell and Maxwell’s silver hammer
Those were the days!

**

I once met a very old man
In an Estonian bar
He said he was the child
Who rang Strindberg’s doorbell
Then hid in the bushes
Hence, he laid claim
To being the inciting ghost
He was of course
Very drunk

**

Whitman’s pony was named “Frank”

Uncle and Aunt history read together by the hearth…

Uncle and Aunt history read together by the hearth
Tonight its Wittgenstein’s notebook
“Ethics and aesthetics are one”
“No one should believe this,” Uncle says
“I think he was reading Keats,” Auntie says
A big wind howls outside their house
Their rude little house—ugly really
“Look,” says Uncle
“Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.”
Like Lear and his fool
They go out into the storm
Shaking their cadaverous fists

The Titanic keeps sinking and sinking…

The Titanic keeps sinking and sinking
And Uncle history thinks he knows why
But he’ll never tell
Its enough
That the story
Is never done
It keeps him youthful
Though he remembers
The world’s first shipwreck
The papyrus was soggy
But he’s young at heart
There was a Victrola
On the doomed ship
But only one record:
Tarantella Sincera
A comic song
To be sure

Uncle History and Blood

The trouble with “being” history
Is that your blood is everywhere—
In fact there’s too little for the heart
In turn this affects premonitory moods
Stepping around puddles
Uncle history has to look down
Before he can look up
The unknowable is known
“This is terrible” he thinks
“Where’s the Aeolian harp?”
But the wheel of history
With solidifying blood
Turns with
And without him
With its tumbrel squeaks

Uncle history wishes he could fiddle like Nero

Uncle history wishes he could fiddle like Nero
But he’s tone deaf and clumsy
Still he loves Shostakovich
And the music of distress
He loves the composer’s humor:
‘Love us when we are dirty
Not when we are clean…”
The planet is filthy
Across the globe
Children are in rags
Landlords laugh
Til they wet their pants
Uncle’s hermitage
Is his left eye
Though it scarcely works
How like scattered petals
The ashes falling