Marcus Aurelius

Thank you, Marcus the Golden One, for what you said,

that people who know nothing have opinions that are worthless,

and you might have added, that most of them and us, are crazy.

You can’t walk around the Porch these days to ponder

all the great big thoughts you want to know about.

Jabber and twittering of idiot birds, not bards

or even men and women who share pensées

who couldn’t sharpen a pencil or fill a pen

with ink and never had a notebook to scribble thoughts.

Tourists clustered around the outsize head of Kafka

in Prague could not identify who it was

or ever read a story or aphorism he wrote,

like my students who couldn’t decode Roman numerals

nor wanted to learn how—and always mistook the eighteen hundreds

for the eighteenth century or saw the difference between

Keats and Yeats, sequins and sequence, Minsk

and Pinsk or Omsk and Tomsk, as my grandma used to say.

Al in a muddle of big an little thoughts,

Memories of times, Marcus, you never lived through,

But I am burdened with guilt of ancestors you would have killed.

 

 

 On Turtle Lake, Hamilton

 

A turtle’s head glides through the water,

almost obscured

by autumn leaves on the surface.

We haven’t seen him in several years,

He and his little family.

They used to sun themselves on the rock

Near the artificial waterfalls.

One of those boulders has a group

Of metal statues on it

As though the little pond

Needed creatures of this sort

To earn its name, but no real ones

Are allowed. The rats and guardians

Of the gardens see to that.

Once every few years

we see this head and imagine the rest,

His body and his family.

Meanwhile someone pried off

one of the turtles from the rock.

Everything is obscure

And out of balance.