William Hathaway

Today a celebrity chimpanzee went postal, tearing up a woman’s face in Connecticut. And as the Taliban were given the suburbs of Swat in which to stone to death women taken in adultery, a Muslim in New York whose radio station promoted Islam as the most humane religion cut off his wife’s head. Tomorrow, of course, will be another day, but we live one day at a time. Yesterday I uncovered the ribbon snake in the woodpile, stiff and cold in its winter sleep. A new urgency for spring: I put the split log back and took my wood from the farther end of the last stack. What’s with the chimp? I wondered, driving between filthy snowbanks past stark trees like bony hands clawing up out of the frozen earth to grab a gray heaven. My wife thinks it’s all that wireless buzz hissing unbeknownst through everyone’s brains. I lean more toward toilet training. For sure, it began to go bad one unknown day before history when the last man was browbeaten to step beyond a globe of golden firelight to drain his dragon in outer darkness. But we can’t dwell in the past, can we? “To spring out on” we call hereabouts the firewood we wade through crusted snow to cut in March. Someone just might have to wake up early this year. But, then, let’s just try to stay in the day, shall we?

It’s now all about money about which poetry rarely reaches transcendence. But love must still fester even under that. Everyone I know frets if poetry can still matter, but what about love? It’s all become too much for them, and they’re all on the soma. It makes sense with these pills when the someone they thought they loved for years by never thinking about it says, “I don’t love you anymore, but let’s stay friends in that mellow woebegone way poetry now sings without singing.” Of course, they’re always asking “What is poetry?” and then answering by saying it’s what Boethius was thinking about when they squished his head until his eyes popped out, or anything barbaric enough to get everyone to stop eating for a bit and reach for a moment past a chatty moment. Sort of a solution to awkward goodbyes. How money becomes a sort of welcome relief that defuses the poetry charging tense moments. “Interesting,” someone remarks between bites, “to be right here in the moment yet also out there watching some once-in-a-lifetime sublimity unfold, as if living as if already dead.” As if standing in a dream far up in the stars somewhere with Scipio