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
No comments:
Post a Comment