My glimpse

    Fifty years later, the detail enlarge-

    ment is still the best penetration I

    have found, of the character of this

    snapshot from Cam Ranh Bay. I under-

    stand the expression at this moment,

    because I had seen it for 20 years.

    I was born with a youngster officer, 

    looking after me. Whenever in life I

    have turned, in pain or fear or des-

    pair, even before 1969, I have felt

    he has known what I mean. I know it.

Suppose Aeneas were American

How far our migrant always is from
setting up shop on destiny's shore.

In the meantime, there would be

a tiresome quality to his trials

if they were not flush with daz-

zling perpetuity, the indefatig-

able mechanism of surreptitious

poetry sending furtive messages

of being seen somewhere before.

      See to it that the Trojans

      Will never find their dwelling place and home

      In Italy. You know the ways to do it.

      You can make brother living in harmony

      With brother in concord turn on each other and bring

      Their house in hatred down around their heads.

      You know the way to bring the funeral torch.

      Your ways to hurt have a thousand different names.

      Your heart is full of possibilities.

      Shake them all loose at once. Do all of them.

      Tear peace to pieces. Sow the seeds of war.

      Make all the young men mad to take up arms.

Suppose Aeneas were American, and that a great last stand against him were invoked from the highest offices of trust, by resort to sowing permutations of confusion. We would see this, and tire of mentioning it, tire of thinking of it, every day an effluent of bombastic, vain alarms cranked from acrid tidal pools, demanding to be heeded. A shipwreck explained, as if it were contained in this day's drip.

I think it's more polite to recognize the familiar in what is irksome than to strive to copyright an anxious shot in the dank of expertise. We revisit Juno's speech to Allecto in Book Seven of Aeneas' story to see if anything's changed. 

Thomas Gainsborough
  Gainsborough Dupont
ca 1772

Virgil
The Aeneid
David Ferry
  translation
University of Chicago Press
2017©

So much eloquence, so little time

I've been interested in The Aeneid again lately, so I've been less attracted to the prospect of achieving moral satisfaction, offered by people who advocate the impeachment of the American President, when the commitments of translators of that poem fur-nish so much of that fleeting peace by their example. The rendering of that work into English is one of the great struggles the mind can undertake, and we have seen how the ordeal yields an appreciation of an impossibility revealed even in the original. Inevitably, to witness this dilemma's exposure is to undergo the seeming urgency of experiencing its consequence, a trust in the limits of the intellect against impassioned certitude.

Human beings appear to have no choice but to strive for beautiful, orderly explanations of the ugly things we do. These explanations may also represent a basic drive - and in one way a more painful one. We have chances to get land, livelihood, and security for the next generation, pretty much in the forms we imagined or even better, though the cost will be high. We cannot match in reality our vision of what we need to create from our minds. Virgil couldn't, and I certainly couldn't in my efforts to translate his glorious poem.

Anything like a zeal for an impeachment verges on a vain matching of this awe-somely fateful need to create, with reality. Who sees its consequence?

James McNeill Whistler

The Ocean Wave

1883-84

  Whistler in Watercolor

  On exhibition at the Freer

    through November 3

Virgil

The Aeneid

Sarah Ruden

  translator

  fragment from her

  essay of introduction

Yale University Press, 2008©

Šli and the family stone

The upper Adriatic is not the most

fertile setting for dreaming up a

tease for the American president,

but that's where the esteemed col-

umnist for The New York Times, by

way of the internet, found one at

an hour I will not mention. Still,

to read Gail Collins by the dawn's

early light would be such a tonic

for those who stay up in the dark

to cavort in her latest fantasy, I

feel others may follow one's lead.

Her latest foray into presidential

interaction is so promising in its

particulars, and flawless in expres-

sion, that I commend it without a

single excerpt to spoil a delicious

sequencing of inspired irritants. If

you are not too elderly to withstand

the occasional ribald allusion, the

whole tenor of the thing encourages

being read to the tides, high or low.

Gail Collins
How to torture Trump
  Who's less popular than
  Elton John?
The New York Times
August 14, 2019

Many are making love

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy -
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed . .

 I've been making my own
 truant discoveries in the
 poetry of Robert Hass.


 Well, I'm sorry to have
 taken so long, but I do
 report from time to time
 from David Ferry, so I'm 
 in no position to claim 
 I've not been looking out.

and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags . .

Robert Hass
The Privilege of Being
  [fragments]
The Apple Trees
  at Olema
  New and Selected 
  Poems
Harper Collins, 2010©

Mindfulness? Wellness? Seamanship?

Playing fair.

Valéry Lorenzo

Voilier

2013

Saturday commute clv: A sociable buoyancy

A spar running out
from ship's stem
to which forestays
are fastened.

   I note how Apple's domestic lexicon

   tracks with the Oxford English Dic-

   tionary's definition of a bowsprit,

   with no litigation over plagiarism.

   Thinking different, yielding to the

   temptations of conformity, or going

   soft in concessions to convenience?

J.B. Sykes

  editor

The Concise Oxford

  Dictionary of Current

  English

Oxford University Press, 1964©

    

Nocturne: The Solent

I admit, my deepest impressions of Fake News are from Homer, of a strait at sea where the flouting of impinging, vital realities accounts for breathtaking illusions of mastery, up to a point. 

James McNeill Whistler
Nocturne: The Solent
1866

On my way to Guéthary

   The open secret, that the diagnostic

   imaging platforms of modern medicine

   are as close as most of us are like-

   ly to come to an Atlantic crossing in

   First Class on the Normandie, was not

   lost on me in an inconceivably expen-

   sive ride in the radiology wing of a

   local hospital, only this week. What

   I missed by way of deck sports cer-

   tainly was recompensed by the pres-

   tige of my exposure to body-surfing

   loads of lethal energy, and all of

   it a tax-free benevolence of one or

   another of our sovereign insurance

   empires. Offered my little identify-

   ing wristband as a keepsake of this

   journey, I realized I had been only

   the baggage of an opulent carriage.

Practicing for good weather

     Through your carapace,

     reports of irregularities

     reaching you apace,

Paul Muldoon

Horse Latitudes

  90 Instant Messages

  to Tom Moore, xlvii

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006©

Charles Hellmuth

Lower Broadway

1920s

Whistler

Sailboats in Blue Water

Late 19th C

A year, untuning just one string

Pandarus. You have no judgment, niece. Helen herself
          swore th'other day that Troilus, for a brown
          favour - for so 'tis, I must confess - not brown
          neither -

Cressida. No, but brown.

Pandarus. Faith, to say truth, brown and not brown.

Cressida. To say truth, true and not true.

A year of desperate misdirection in resistance to rampant, ruthless treachery in American high office found commentator after commentator promising that the next infraction would clarify one's purpose, not to say the plain obligations of words. What began as a universal revulsion with leering denunciation of a female for being female, reaches now a peak in dithering conjecture on what to say about a multi-front war on fact, its institutions, and their survival in the shakiest society this continent has ever known. What is more galling than a privileged voice that will not speak, for fear of what is plain, if not the falseness of objection, gaudily ornamented? Shame now wrings its perfect emulation, as our schoolboy mourns the half-eclipse of his curriculum, just not its tireless prince. He comes.

         The specialty of rule hath been neglected.

         And look how many Grecian tents do stand

         Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions.

         When that the general is not like the hive

         To whom the foragers all repair,

         What honey is expected? Degree being vizarded,

         The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.

         The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre

         Observe degree, priority, and place,

         Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

         Office, and custom, in all line of order.

         And therefore is the glorious planet Sol

         In noble eminence enthron'd and spher'd

         Amidst the other; whose med'cinable eye

         Corrects the influence of evil planets,

         And posts like the commandment of a king,

         Sans check, to good and bad. 

                                    But when the planets

         In evil mixture to disorder wander,

         What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,

         What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,

         Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,

         Divert and crack, rend and deracinate

         The unity and married calm of states

         Quite from their fixture! 

                                 O, when degree is shak'd

         Which is the ladder of all high designs,

         The enterprise is sick. How could communities,

         Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

         Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

         The primogenity and due of birth,

         Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

         But by degree stand in authentic place?

         Take but degree away, untune that string,

         And hark what discord follows. Each thing melts

         In mere oppugnancy; the bounded waters

         Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

         And make a sop of all this solid globe;

         Strength should be lord of imbecility,

         And the rude son should strike his father dead;

         Force should be right - or rather, right and wrong,

         Between whose endless jar justice resides,

         Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

         Then everything includes itself in power,

         Power into will, will into appetite,

         And appetite, an universal wolf,

         So doubly seconded with will and power,

         Must make perforce an universal prey,

         And last eat up himself.

William Shakespeare

Troilus and Cressida

  I, iii, 78 - 123

ca 1608

Kenneth Palmer

  editor

The Arden Shakespeare

Methuen, 1982©

René Girard

A Theatre of Envy

  William Shakespeare

Oxford University Press, 1991©

i   Michael Verheyden

     bowl

ii  Christopher Thompson

    Oil on canvas

    2017©

iv  Constantine Manos

     Photograph, untitled

     Northern Peloponnese

     1964