January 1, 2026


A cold hawklike sky scans the labyrinth
At the top of my property.  What gives?

The circles are meant to yield useful hints
About what it actually means to live.

But hasn't it been hundreds of years since
Padding around little pagan... ?  Forgive,

But surely you've read last century's black prince?
The Psychopathy of Everyday Life?

The title's wrong.  I simply can't convince
Myself to follow ideas that don't outlive

Their own time.  OTOH hellish pits
Remain impressively generative,

Though for me make nothing happen... Look, it's
Silly, okay, to turn about the glyphs

Expecting to score existential hits -
Thoughts to be cherished like the thought of heaven

To quote Stevens.  My paver walk permits
At best a chance to - with passion! - relive

The lives of people I've loved.  At best it
Is a chance to toast my dead convives.

The best of the rest is poetry, which understands that the world worlds (Larkin: ‘Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest/ Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,/ And dark towns heap up on the horizon./None of this cares for us.’) (Stevens: ‘Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail/ Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness…’) — it all goes on without us; and though we crave worlding’s unconscious endless essence, we generate some of our greatest poems out of our failure to satisfy that craving. We are human selves, not berries ripening in isolation – in total wilderness! – to fulfillment. We want of course to ripen, to live in transcendent fulfillment with our nature, but we are bound, human all too human, to the world, to a running commentary with the world. A running battle with it, really:

“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”

Our inescapable battle, observes Henry James, is with what humans have made of the world; there’s absolutely no chance we can abandon the battle in favor of some humongously seductive state of calm autonomous being. Only the world can world.

****************************

Or, I mean, we can do stupid shit like mainline heroin and all the other opiates the Sackler family so famously monetized. UD ain’t gonna stand here and deny the depth of that business … Not so much MAKE THE WORLD GO AWAY… STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF as make me a sweet berry ripening in the oxysphere…

AFTER GREECE

James Merrill 1969

Light into the olive entered
And was oil. Rain made the huge, pale stones
Shine from within. The moon turned his hair white
Who next stepped from between the columns,
Shielding his eyes. All through
The countryside were old ideas
Found lying open to the elements.
Of the gods’ houses, only
A minor presence here and there
Would be balancing the heaven of fixed stars
Upon a Doric capital. The rest
Lay spilled, their fluted drums half sunk in cyclamen

Or deep in water’s biting clarity
Which just barely upheld me
The next week, when I sailed for home.
But where is home – these walls?
These limbs? The very spaniel underfoot
Races in sleep, toward what?
It is autumn. I did not invite
Those guests, windy and brittle, who drink my liquor.
Returning from a walk, I find
The bottles filled with spleen, my room itself
Smeared by reflection onto the far hemlocks.
I some days flee in dream
Back to the exposed porch of the maidens
Only to find my great-great-grandmothers
Erect there, peering
Into a globe of red Bohemian glass.

As it swells and sinks I call up
Graces, Furies, Fates, removed
To my country’s warm, lit halls, with rivets forced
Through drapery, and nothing left to bear.
They seem anxious to know
What holds up heaven nowadays.
I start explaining how in that vast fire
Were other irons – well, Art, Public Spirit,
Ignorance, Economics, Love of Self,
Hatred of Self, a hundred more,
Each burning to be felt, each dedicated
To sparing us the worst; how I distrust them
As I should have done those ladies; how I want
Essentials: salt, wine, olive, the light, the scream–
No! I have scarcely named you,
And look, in a flash you stand full-grown before me,

Row upon row, Essentials,
Dressed like your sister caryatids,
Or tombstone angels jealous of their dead,
With undulant coiffures, lips weathered, cracked by grime,
And faultless eyes gone blank beneath the immense
Zinc-and-gunmetal northern sky.
Stay then. Perhaps the system
Calls for spirits. This first glass I down
To the last time
I ate and drank in that old world. May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

*******************************

Of course the system, such as it is, calls for spirits. You can imagine – you can forgive – Merrill hitting the bottle.

Answer: Frederick Seidel.

The Epstein story features not only an Epsteinian Harvard president; it features an Epsteinian poetry professor. ‘[Elisa] New discussed her personal projects at length with Epstein, soliciting thousands of dollars in funding from the child sex trafficker several times — years after Harvard said it had stopped taking contributions from Epstein.’ Indifferent, it seems, to his criminality, New excitedly praised and delighted in Epstein in her solicitation emails to him. She was happy – desperate, even – to take his money. She visited Pedo Island, as it was later known, on her honeymoon in 2005, traveling there with Ghislaine Maxwell.

One can only hope that among the poets New sought to tell her audience about was the man of the American Elites hour, Seidel, who rhapsodizes about – in the lilting alliterative words of New’s husband, Summers (in an email exchange with Epstein) – “life among the lucrative and louche.”

Maybe it seems difficult to you – poetizing the selfish lecherous arrogance of the obscenely rich one percent – but Seidel shows that it can be done. The muse of the money masturbators, the bard of the brackish, he versifies “his penchant for hand-built Ducati motorcycles, sex with much younger women, and expensive hotels.”

Let us consider one of his poems, “Widening Income Inequality.”

*****************************

I live a life of appetite and, yes, that’s right,

I live a life of privilege in New York,

Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning.

Say that again?

I have a rule—

I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out.

I woke up this morning in my air-conditioning.

At the end of my legs were my feet.

Foot and foot stretched out outside the duvet looking for me!

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

My feet were there on the far side of my legs.

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

I don’t really think I am going to.

Obama is doing just fine.

I don’t think I’m going to.

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

I can see out the window it isn’t raining.

So much for the endless forecasts, always wrong.

The poor are poorer than they ever were.

The rich are richer than the poor.

Is it true about the poor?

It’s always possible to be amusing.

I saw a rat down in the subway.

So what if you saw a rat.

I admire the poor profusely.

I want their autograph.

They make me shy.

I keep my distance.

I’m getting to the bottom of the island.

Lower Broadway comes to a boil and City Hall is boiling.

I’m half asleep but I’m awake.

At the other end of me are my feet

In shoes of considerable sophistication

Walking down Broadway in the heat.

I’m half asleep in the heat.

I’m, so to speak, wearing a hat.

I’m no Saint Francis.

I’m in one of my trances.

When I look in a mirror,

There’s an old man in a trance.

There’s a Gobi Desert,

And that’s poetry, or rather rhetoric.

You see what happens if you don’t make sense?

It only makes sense to not.

You feel the flicker of a hummingbird

It takes a second to find.

You hear a whirr.

It’s here. It’s there. It hovers, begging, hand out.

************************************

Abed, lazy, post-coital, airconditioned, the poet describes his constant trance-state, barely awake even when he eventually goes out to the hot city streets. Infantile, he contemplates at length his feet and their habit of being at the bottom of his legs, and though he tells them to giddyup, they just lie there. Why should he go anywhere? The president is running the country just fine, maintaining the poet’s life of privilege. He thinks maybe – who knows? who cares? – the poor are getting poorer, but for him they represent celebrities, dramatis personae in a play about poverty whose autographs he covets. They’re not real. He admires his fancy shoes as he walks.

He notes, laconically, that he’s no Saint Francis, who gave up his personal wealth to live among the poor; au contraire, he could care less. Nor does it bother him that he himself is a big fat nothing, a Gobi Desert, though maybe he could make something poetic of that comparison… yawn… wake me up when this poem’s over…

And as for nature. As for the beauty of the natural world… that’s all beggars again. A world of people and animals holding out their hands to you asking for food or money or whatever… Fuck them. I live a life of appetite too, but mine is satisfied.

Down, Net Worth, Down!

Down, net worth, down!  Have you no shame
That after all my worthy Gift-Acclaim,
My Virtue, presto! up you raise
A billion more, and stand at gaze?

Poor online shopping shares, sworn to reach
More billions, and effect a breach -
Indifferent what you storm or why,
So that in the breach you multiply!

UD loves found poetry, and this decasyllabic morsel, describing my magnolia, and confirming what I’ve noticed – that it’s a “favorite food of catbirds” – is a perfect example.

*****************

Haiku?

Seed pod of sweet-bay
Magnolia tree, trembling.
Not wind.  A cat bird.

… an old post of mine about one of his poems.

Most beach poems are sad. Most poems are sad. Most lives are sad. ‘The reason that there are so many depressed people,’ writes UD‘s guru, Adam Phillips, ‘is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery.‘

After a morning reading lots of beach poems, UD finds herself charmed by this old-fashioned one – strict end rhyme and pretty strict meter, written in 1913 by a guy you’ve never heard of – Ridgely Torrence – and titled “Santa Barbara Beach.” It could have been any beach – Nungwi, Sarandë – cuz almost no beach poems are specific to the sand where the poet happens to have sunk his/her feet. Poetic beaches are beaches whose vast uncontrollable deathless sublimity catalyzes thoughts of human frailty, brevity, fatality. On a big beach under a bright sun we stand out in dramatic relief in all our littleness against the massive depth and breadth of the ocean, and this evokes thoughts of our sweetness and poignancy, to be sure – we are drawn to the ocean’s shore because we are drawn to beauty, might, heat, majesty, eternality, which is a very nice thing about us qua humans – but it mainly evokes thoughts of our brief befuddled plunge into being.

I’ll interrupt your reading of this poem with commentary. Read it without interruption here.

*********************

Santa Barbara Beach

by Ridgely Torrence

Now while the sunset offers,
Shall we not take our own:
The gems, the blazing coffers,
The seas, the shores, the throne?

[A spectacular sunset lights up a jeweled world of riches, possibilities, and the poet invites us to take our share. This feels like a world we own, and this is the moment to grasp it with joy.]

The sky-ships, radiant-masted,
Move out, bear low our way.
Oh, Life was dark while it lasted,
Now for enduring day.

[The rayed sinking sun is like a brilliantly lit ship, the rays the masts, and its lowness on the horizon feels like a generous bow toward us, the owners of the world, a bow that lights up our path along the strand. In an ironic reversal, the poet describes daylight life as dark, and sunset life as light — in the harsh light of typical day, we see and feel the paucity of our spiritual surroundings. But in the gleaming disseminated light of sunset, we feel our earth and ourselves emblazoned in a low enveloping flame, a flame that feels as though it will last forever.]

Now with the world far under,
To draw up drowning men
And show them lands of wonder
Where they may build again.

[Day is done, its world is subdued, and the spiritual light of sunset can now transport us from our “drowned” lives (We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.) to a higher world of new possibilities.]

There earthly sorrow falters,
There longing has its wage;
There gleam the ivory altars
Of our lost pilgrimage.

[This stanza elaborates upon the rich world of human and spiritual possibilities illuminated by the setting sun, a sun which puts the daylight world “under” and illuminates a new world of new life. Sorrow, longing, lostness – all that we feel in our daylight lives, vanishes in the brilliant promise of this moment.]

Swift flame—then shipwrecks only
Beach in the ruined light;
Above them reach up lonely
The headlands of the night.

[Sudden nasty transition here: Sunset’s mystic flame lasted only moments, and in its ruined light we see “what’s really always there” — the oncoming black of deathly night. Night is even darker, if you will, than day.]

A hurt bird cries and flutters
Her dabbled breast of brown;
The western wall unshutters
To fling one last rose down.

[These are images of beautiful natural things – the bird, the rose – in their last moments. The oncoming black wall at least lets one last petal down for us.]

A rose, a wild light after—
And life calls through the years,
“Who dreams my fountain’s laughter
Shall feed my wells with tears.”

[In life, we have epiphanies – moments of illumination, wild light, when in extreme beauty and meaning, the world calls to us.

But what does it say? We who love life and hear within it the laughter of joy and spirit, are doomed – post-sunset – to weep oceans of tears. The more we expect of existence, the more betrayed we will be.

“Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof in the end come despondency and madness.”]

“Tesla is in Freefall”

_____________________

Elon, are you grieving

Over Golden Tess unleaving?

Cars, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the DOGE grows older

We will come to such cars colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wood trim leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, Musk, the name:

Falling stocks are aflame.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What markets heard of, investors guessed:

It is the panic Tess was born for,

It is Elon you mourn for.

This passage from Love’s Work, Gillian Rose’s meditation on love and death, comes to mind as I read about the creeping, escalating de-creation of the island of Santorini, where “homes break apart” in the earthquakes.

Rose’s own disaster – the cancer that would kill her at 48 soon after she finished Love’s Work – generated her argument that life was best lived as an agon, an unceasing passionate losing heroic beautiful struggle toward clarity, justice, and bliss, against the forces of if you like subduction — error/fault, leading to destruction and death.

*****************************

UD’s favorite poem, James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak, dances just this passionate expiring dance on the most beautiful of the world’s islands (Santorini is insanely beautiful because of its history of unimaginable natural catastrophe) at the very end of the long verse. The poet/poem dances

a grave dance - as if catastrophe
could long be lulled

A grave dance – serious, but also morbid, a dance danced over the centuries of bodies that lie under the island’s volcanic catastrophes. Merrill, visiting the island just having had his own radiation therapy for a cancer on his foot, is dancing on his own grave, and he is as much aware as Rose that the special spiritual passion ignited by the aesthetic bliss of being on gorgeously morbid/passionate Santorini merely damps for a time the subterranean fires. “No foothold on the void,” writes Merrill.

Or not really merely. If Rose and Merrill are right, that lulling dance over one’s grave is the finest expressive substance of our lives, the best that existence has to offer.

***********************

Merrill’s poem is obsessed with the business of boundaries, of avoiding both the crippling madness of what he calls “psychic incontinence,” when you let too much of the world in and are overwhelmed, and “cemented boundaries,” when, in terror of the fires that underlie, you close off the self in self-protection. [Tante] Taube, a veteran survivor, … had fought the grave to a standstill, balking death itself by her slowness, Saul Bellow’s Herzog thinks as he regards his aunt’s non-life balking death through sheer inactivity. Between the madness of too much and the deathliness of too little you find most of us working our way toward how much of our aliveness – to quote the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips – we can bear:

[E]verybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves… We all have self-cures for strong feeling. Then the self-cure becomes a problem, in the obvious sense that the problem of the alcoholic is not alcohol but sobriety. Drinking becomes a problem, but actually the problem is what’s being cured by the alcohol. By the time we’re adults, we’ve all become alcoholics. That’s to say, we’ve all evolved ways of deadening certain feelings and thoughts. One of the reasons we admire or like art, if we do, is that it reopens us in some sense — as Kafka wrote in a letter, art breaks the sea that’s frozen inside us. It reminds us of sensitivities that we might have lost at some cost. Freud gets at this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It’s as though one is struggling to be as inert as possible — and struggling against one’s inertia.

Santorini is always reconstituting itself amid the undermining that is its own violent, beauty-making dissolution, and this is the ideal the poet pursues for himself and for us. The poet “tighten[s] by a notch/The broad, star-studded belt Earth wears to feel/Hungers less mortal for a vanished whole.” This is Rose again: Stop hungering for a vanished whole; you and Santorini are nothing but gorgeous fragments, and that contingency is all you ever will be. Be like the poet and stud the earth with aesthetic jewels:

Our lives unreal
Except as jeweled self-windings

The poet’s words on windy Santorini are

bellowed to recycle
The bare, thyme-tousled world we’d stumbled on

We bejewel the bareness; we break what’s frozen, or quench the fires. Silent Santorini can only live in

imbecile 
Symbiosis with the molten genie

Our symbiosis is verbal. Ours are self-windings – they emerge from our human individual expressive battles between stasis and agon; and what our noblest battles produce will be the spoken truth of the broken beauty of being.

We had fed the Fed on fantasies
The Fed's grown fecal from the fare,
Stagnation in amenities
Breeds microbes everywhere.  Oh, GS-bees
Come build in the empty house of the State.

I'm doing what I did last year:

Standing on a cold Venetian balcony, listening.
The others have gone off to the canal
To see the fireworks.  For me, enough to hear
The crack and blast of the show from a distance.

Under the stars, the sky flashes pink and green
With each explosion.  The balcony rattles a bit
And, from dark corners of the city, unseen
Voices shout that a new year begins.

Strange to be here again for this strange
Light show, a sort of conceptual art,
Postmodern version of pitched battle,
Gunfight, terror, striking the heart

But sparing the body.  Some of it
Sounds like gunshots, and then my frame,
Like the balcony, rattles a bit.
Absurd.  But who can blame

Me for going there?  The only bombing campaign
I'll ever know simply smokes up the air
And leaves me standing there
Wondering about skirmish scrimmage and war.

Take a loose rein and a deep seat,
John, my father-in-law, would say
To someone starting out on a long journey, meaning, take it easy,
Relax, let what’s taking you take you.

On festive and non-festive days, old UD loves to read the poems of James Merrill. In the last weeks of his life, he wrote Christmas Tree, in which his wasting body is compared to a holiday tree taken in and decorated by a celebrating family — he is made to feel loved and cared for and even prettied up, shined up, in his last days, although the poet/tree knows that, having been cut down, his/its days are very much numbered. The hospital was the tree farm, where the poet has been “looked after, kept still,” but now it’s clear “there [is] nothing more to do,” and the poet will have to leave the hospital and go home to die.

Yet it’s Merrill, the poet, who inexhaustibly, to the end, elaborates, accessorizes, decorates, warms, and bejewels life — as I said in my last post about him, he’s no discouraged Prufrock. He keeps going, keeps embellishing. He’s an artist, mes petites. We can’t rescue the family jewels from the fire, but he can. Even as he’s dying, he can. Surrounded by loved ones in his warm home, covered in thick “sables,” nonetheless jewels from life continue to “flash forth” around him from these coverings. He’s not buried yet. Propitiating miracle-makers (amulets, milagros) hang from his body and a song plays and replays – brilliant, magical life continues to be wound about him.

And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going.

The holiday and the primitive at-home IV/ivy. To keep the blood going. Heart-stopping poetry if you ask me.

Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—

No bullshit about it, I’m all lit up and about to die; my festive duties done, my poems written, I’m about to be stripped of my jewels, with my poor naked trunk about to be revealed for the rail-thin thing it is. I’m about to be buried, pine/IV “needles and bone.” And I’m ready to go.

Last image from last moments – a world in dusk, to be sure, but dusk “aglow,” with candlelight, loving faces, gifts brought to the tree, brought by the tree.

Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.

The last lines of the last poem echo Merrill’s endless reverberating theme, as in his great poem “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” where he insists on walking the volcanic, gorgeous island, staying poised and balanced and upright, despite serious pain from ailments in his feet. The imperative always is to stay in the game, to remain receptive to all of life, to call and recall, and above all to lyrically praise.

Christmas Tree

⭐

To be
Brought down at last
From the cold sighing mountain
Where I and the others
Had been fed, looked after, kept still,
Meant, I knew—of course I knew—
That it would be only a matter of weeks,
That there was nothing more to do.
Warmly they took me in, made much of me,
The point from the start was to keep my spirits up.
I could assent to that. For honestly,
It did help to be wound in jewels, to send
Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep
Fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot.

Over me then they wove a spell of shining—
Purple and silver chains, eavesdripping tinsel,
Amulets, milagros: software of silver,
A heart, a little girl, a Model T,
Two staring eyes. Then angels, trumpets, BUD and BEA
(The children’s names) in clownlike capitals,
Somewhere a music box whose tiny song
Played and replayed I ended before long
By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—
No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn’t bear,
Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.
Needles and bone. The little boy’s hands meeting
About my spine. The mother’s voice: Holding up wonderfully!
No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today’s

Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candlelight.
Faces love-lit
Gifts underfoot.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.

***************************

Similar themes here.

Take these verses, call them today’s flower,

Cluster a rained‐in pupil might have scissored.

They too have suffered in the realm of hazard.

Sorry things all. Accepting them’s the art.

**********************************************

The sad random childish awkward scissoring together of metaphor and sentiment makes of a poem a gift to the world, a gift to the lover.

This is clearly a pathetic gift, one of the sorry things all... The cluster the pupil makes means to be beautiful, a flower; but the pupil’s crude and cutting instrument of art – the scissors – guarantees a sorry thing, a thing unavoidably emerging from/entering into the realm of hazard, from our messy thrownness into being.

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head

               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

               That is not it, at all.”

Prufrock knows the lover will not accept his poem, his gift, his hazarded random thing that carries his love and his hoped-for transcendent meaning. She, pillowed in contingency, had not meant to excite that sentiment, that meaning, at all, and she shatters him and breaks his heart refusing it. She will shatter him – so he will withhold the gift out of self-protection. He won’t even try.

Merrill the poet tries and tries in every poem; and for him, rather than withdrawing from the field of love and meaning and beauty and gift-giving, we must simply keep trying. The art that matters is the art of accepting what gifts there are – the hopeless lover’s overtures indeed, but more importantly the conditions of existence themselves: dailiness, balanced meals (see the post below) and all. Therein lies the true art – not the always-inept creation of a poem, but an open forgiving ever-reanimated ever-hopeful embrace of the sad contingency even in the most achieved Shakespeare sonnet.

Thus in his great poem “After Greece,” when a depressed Merrill returns home from the exuberant liberating glories of Athens to the crimped waspy realities of his American upbringing – that particular existence into which he was thrown – he ends with a kind of prayer:

 May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

Best is to have the fortitude to take on the burden of your own sad contingencies — not head-on, because that would be ungeneratively painful (one of Merrill’s best-known collections is titled The Fire-Screen), as well as the sad contingencies of loved others. One will always be a clumsy “pupil” of life, expressively ‘reined in’ (Merrill loves to pun) by the repressive fire-screening in which all sane people must engage. The highest art is accepting those sorry things all — even as you forgive yourself for – speaking poetically, quoting Wallace Stevens – the intricate evasions of as.

Thanksgiving poems stink of kitsch.
I search in vain for even one which
Leaves off redemption and the kids
The wife who saved me from the skids
The mom whose deep abiding love
Gave my rear a needed shove...

Instead of thanking friends and God
I'll thank the books that showed me Odd
Kafka, Beckett, E A Poe
Their twisted landscape helped me know
That sentiment is fine and good
But most of life's in darkest wood