'
The sermon for Friday, May. 17, 2002 is: hiccough
10:52 a.m. Me hate me. I'm so pretentious and it's even more insufferable that I mention I'm pretentious and yet go on being pretentious. Isn't that pretentious? Anyway. bettinas, my darling correspondent in heaven, mentions Auden's September 1, 1939 in her most recent entry; and this reminded me of a poem I've just found yesterday, which I'd written a week after September 11; I imagine that a lot of us were trying to come up with something to succeed Auden. Anyway, this is my effort, weak and feeble as it is. True, fifty years have passed Pacific and secured us a lull That, temps perdu, have made our senses dull. It did not seem overmuch to ask Our innocence to continue, our sense Of self constrained to no task Greater than the propulsion from day To day. Imagine what those birds had thought, Sprouting wings of jet-fueled flame From their briefcases and raincoats As they fell, birds on fire, a mile or two Onto the country which had blankly supported them. They were the last hostages Of a country unaware of ambush, The last sleepers to wake To a day ungirdled with furious resolve. Start again. A new millennium, A world checked and cross-checked with global purpose, Awakening and slumbering to the same cultural references. Imagine that world, six thousand lives ago. *** Conversation is snarled. The normal heart That Auden apostrophised has broken down, The normal heart has broken down, and there's this sense --
Do you feel it? -- for awaiting the drop Of the other shoe. God, I hate euphemism But a euphemistic banality helps mitigate The short jabbed shock of our stopped Trust in the conveyance of days: We try to tell each other it is not too late,
We try to tell each other that we can say The diplomatic words that will dissipate The stick the stab the thrust of the box-
Cutter held at all our throats. But our conversation is snarled, and our poems Continuously resound the same strangled note.
 
|
