Please note: This week’s post is guest written by Harvard poet and wild man, Jonathan Douglas.
I had rather be a kitten and cry mew
1 Henry IV, 3.1
Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers;
I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn’d,
Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree;
And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry:
‘Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.
We remain clowns, our pale makeup receding into the twilight. Our boots have grown old, uncomfortable, and rooted to a ground not our home. Our feet have grown old, painful, and rootless—aiming increasingly for the wind with each step.
Wind over grasses. Stars.
Inside ourselves, we still love the same. Same passion. Same will.
Only that we cannot walk as far. Just as many mountains, but at some point, as the fisherman says, we become aware that we are not likely to go as far into them as we once did.
The snow falls around us. Sunlight falls around us. Drones hover around us. Planes…
Best to let it be. Let it be. Let it be. Let it be. Mother Mary comes to me. Damned the words of wisdom. Let it be.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. Me too, Mr. Eliot. Now, we all shall do so. Thanks so much for coming. Thanks for bringing cake.
We bid the actors farewell.
Polonius: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy,
Hamlet 2.2
history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral,
tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral; scene
individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor
Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are
the only men.
Denmark, and Polonius says, “For the law of writ and liberty, these are the only men.”
No one in the play mentions Greenland.
We do the hokey pokey, turning ourselves around.
Sounds of distant traffic. Little birds tapping at the morning window. We’ll soon take care of that.
Like going deaf
this slipping
coyotes yipping
from the nearby night.
gradually, or all at once,
our teeth have fallen out,
and our own voice
become too rusted
for us to answer.
Crickets,
then the thinnest line of light
along the long rim of night.
Now time for quiet,
quiet.
“Quiet” by Jonathan Douglas, 2025.
We eat the broad shoulders of the savannah, looking out into eyes of docile skies, or into the drama of our days. Winter cold has no agenda, and neither do we, the edge of lakes becoming solid, frosty nights weaving themselves into our sleep.
Slipping into sleep. Aye, there’s rubbing the eyes for you. Rub the strangeness from your sight if you can. Except you cannot. All our lives, our sight remains stranger and stranger. Stranger daze. Stranger things. Stranger danger.
We lock the sleestacks away, the threats of our youth, or of our future. Perhaps both at once. The classical Chinese view of all time happening at once—past, present, future, now. All wound together in strands barely separated if at all. The only separation is illusion. The only reliable and stable thing is all of the incessant change.
No special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
In the deepening twilight shadows of the courtyard, the boy throws a stone at the crow. His father asks him why. The boy says that everyone says the crow’s call brings misfortune. The father gently admonishes the boy. Man knows more than a crow. If man cannot know fate, how could a crow know it?
Birds call in the ravine. In the spring night, osmanthus blossoms fall. We idle in the grass. Splendor.
Barnardine refuses to die on such a day. Having been drinking hard all night, he is unprepared to die. He will not hear of it. Not a word. Quiet.
We will not seek the rest of silence here. A turn or two I’ll walk to still my beating mind.
Call me fishmeal. Two roads diverged in yellow wood and I, I chose the sea. A tall ship, and a star to steer her by.
Such a tide as moving seems asleep. We tell the stories. Same stories every year. Different every year.
Call me fishmeal for I alone am left to tell thee. Nickles with eyes that see—the human condition. Tragic subplot of the jester to the Yeoman. Jack Point’s lament:
Quartet — Elsie, Phoebe, Fairfax, and Point
Elsie and Fair. When a wooer
Goes a-wooing,
Naught is truer
Than his joy.
Maiden hushing
All his suing —
Boldly blushing —
Bravely coy!
All. Oh, the happy days of doing!
Oh, the sighing and the suing!
When a wooer goes a-wooing.
Oh, the sweets that never cloy!
Phoe. (weeping). When a brother
Leaves his sister
For another.
Sister weeps.
Tears that trickle.
Tears that blister—
'Tis but mickle
Sister reaps!
All. Oh, the doing and undoing.
Oh, the sighing and the suing,
When a brother goes a-wooing,
And a sobbing sister weeps!
Point. When a jester
Is outwitted.
Feelings fester.
Heart is lead!
Food for fishes
Only fitted.
Jester wishes
He was dead!
All. Oh, the doing and undoing.
Oh, the sighing and the suing.
When a jester goes a-wooing.
And he wishes he was dead!
[Exeunt all but Phoebe, who remains weep'
ing.
“When a Wooer goes a Wooing” from Yeomen of the Guard by Gilbert and Sullivan.
We wish to be. Food for fishes. Only fishes.
Damnation. Tarnation. Tarmac. Can we have some air traffic control over here please? Ah, no. It is in the interests of the nation to let them go. Just let them go, and be ye blithe and bonny.
Ho hum, the bees knees, those knees at which we used to kneel and tell everything. Old customs gone like lightning. Like the preacher with an “A” blazing forth on his chest when he tears open his shirt. But we hide. Tell the bees? I dare not. Do you?
True love is the noblest of reasons, but to blague means only to bluff. So, you were probably playing poker and…
Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
That swingset was erected too close to the garden. That garden was built too close to the swamp. We must drain the swamp. Yet, the graveyard has been there for a century or more. What the hell can we do? Dig up grandma? Let the corvids swoop down upon this world. And leave the world to darkness and to me.
You drinking that runoff from the nucular power plant again, Junior? Stop that! How many times have I told you that’s not the way to get super powers!
Fourth world, fifth world, sixth world, more. Hey, hey, we’re the monkeys! People think we’re messing around. We’re just too busy…
Long ago we saw a gibbon. Sits he still in the same tree? Or was he but a gibbon of the mind, a false creation proceeding from the bored and tedious mind?
Days of wine and roses. Speak softly love and hold me warm against your heart.
Ring around the posies…? Ring around the rosie?
Ashes, ashes…?
We, we merry thugs, we joyous rapesters, rappers, wrappers, how we lower it into the grave.
What the hell?
Trust lip service, or true service. People. People loving people…are the luckiest people in the world.
Calling out to me as they return home: wild geese at night. Ah, Ryokan! You rascal.
Or this:
In drifts of sleep I came upon you
Buried to your waist in snow.
You reached your arms out: I came to
Like water in a dream of thaw.
–Seamus Heaney knew it too.
In the end, we are as we have always been, poised on the verge of orgiastic choice, yet in all that choice we cannot even find ourselves.
The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me— nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
Stop smiling then. And stop drinking that water.
Carl Sandburg spewing into San Francisco fog:
The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open hand held out and waiting.
Choose:
for we meet by one or the other.
You know who you are. I hope you’ll answer. Not for me. For yourself. Please save yourself.
I leave you with the words of the immortal Larry Kearney:
I’d be with you where I’ve been, fallen to grace and to real,
but there are some small things to do are needful,
and will not let me go.
Ah, powers save us, for we evidently cannot save ourselves.
These blocks of text dissolve before us, just as life, liberty, country, and humanity all melt, thaw, and resolve themselves into a dew of deep tears.
Farewell. Fare thee well. We can no longer see a place for us, nor how to carve one out.
Now, it’s Lono time.
