Logic leads me to surmise
Our Lord doesn’t play at dice:
Surely He flips coins instead,
Letting the angels call Tails or Heads.
How else could He fairly settle fights
In Heaven, where everyone is always right?
No Dice
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Monthly Archives: January 2017
Edna St. Vincent Millay (a clerihew)
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare…
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Was heard on occasion to say
That only the author of Euclid’s Elements
Had ever seen Beauty without habiliments.
One supposes she meant to imply that people who do maths
Have taken quite the best of all available paths
And that study of the other sciences might be eschewed
If one wished for a chance to see Beauty nude.
But I wonder what she’d have said had she lived to learn
About the physicists at CERN
Who have managed to catch the Higgs Boson
Without any clothes on?
Albert Einstein got panics (a clerihew)
“As I have said so many times,
God doesn’t play dice with the world.”
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein got panics
From quantum mechanics;
He would have found the world far nicer
Had God not been a dicer.
How lovely is the semblance
How lovely is the semblance
Eternity is come
And Past and Future gathered are
In compass of this room;
How beautiful the sleeping form
The eyes that look within
The hands that do not seek to grasp
The legs that will not run;
Though Memory’s in water writ
However still it pools
This vision having once had
I cannot bear to lose;
I shall become a student
At that patient school of art
That studies years to draw one line
Direct from eye to heart.
There you were
There you were
helping your friends
who were not yet married
before their reception
by cutting something small
smaller,
carrots or cucumbers,
something.
You were being mindful
of the knifeness of the knife
and how strange it was
not because it cut
but because of the way
it cut
and in consequence
you were working
slowly,
holding up
everything and everyone
that depended on you.
I loved you for
your mindful sluggishness,
and how you were unconscious
of your beauty
in the beautiful moment
so now
I think sometimes
how if that beautiful moment had lasted
I might have married you
and you me
and how eventually
someone else would have had to take over
for both of us.
And I think:
how lucky
one moment
doesn’t lead to the next.
Song that Came to Creeping in His Dream
Dragonfly, dragonfly,
Dragonfly, dragonfly,
Unstitch his eyes, unstitch his eyes.
The snow flies, the river is frozen,
Unstitch his eyes.
From tent to tent I go,
I go where I am wanted,
I go wherever they can pay my fee,
I go with the dragonfly,
Together we unstitch his eyes, we unstitch them.
This song is my breath,
Dragonfly, dragonfly,
This song is my breath.
Dragonfly, dragonfly,
My breath is this song.
They come by their twos and threes,
But we will come by our fours.
Stitch up their eyes,
Dragonfly, dragonfly,
Stitch up their eyes, stitch up their eyes.
A Song for Music, with Music, and Ham Kicker
“A Following Song” is a song! Alex Floor wrote the music and recorded it. As songs sometimes do, this one has changed its monicker: you may call it “They Went Their Ways.” It joins Stone’s Throw, which the redoubtable Godescalc (more mundanely, James) brilliantly set to music some time ago…
The thing came about this time because I once happened across the oddly-named Ham Kicker website, “an exhibition of collaborative musical work”:
Poets are encouraged to submit poetry. Songwriters are encouraged to work with poets and their poems to develop songs. Performers are encouraged to interpret or reinterpret songs.
So I sent Ham Kicker’s proprietor (turns out his name is Joe) a poem to put up on the site, and forgot about it for more than a year. And then, a while ago, Joe let me know that Alex had written and recorded music for what is now indisputably a Song. Which made me happy, as you might guess, for it’s a lovely song.
Here is the Hamkicker post introducing the thing; here (again) is the song in all its mp3-compressed glory; there’s sheet music! (I love sheet music!) Here, for some reason, is an undated interview with Joe.
And why not, here’s the poem again, with its new title:
They Went Their Ways
Down by the hill, or lower down,
The larks and lizards built a town.
They sang for fun and lay in the sun
And life was easy.
Seasons came, and came, and came,
And some were different, some the same;
The flowers grew, and blossomed, and blew,
And life was easy.
But a lark grows bold to stretch its wing
While a lizard sleeps and dreams of spring.
So the larks forgot – what the lizards did not –
That life is easy.
Then they went their ways, no one knew why,
Some to the desert and some to the sky,
With the turning spheres and the passing years,
Like life, so easy.
Bag of Anything 