I llike this a lot. I'd just put the "beurs" note at the bottom, or even
in a epigraph, and dispense with the asterisk, which gets in the
reader's way.
I like the title, but it does confuse a little. At first, I thought the
city was Athens, and had to make a mind-switch farther down.
Frederick Pollack wrote:
> Grecian Urn
>
>
> In August, the city empty,
> Madame forgets her name. She scarcely needs it
> for the tourists, wilting with their dollars
> at the curbs; for the *beurs
> she may also pass, who have roamed,
> God alone knows how, thus far
> into civilization; for the girl
> of questionable ancestry who sells
> her bread; or for the residents
> of her building, at whom alone
> she smiles, to whom she is Madame,
> the last of a grand breed.
> Grandfather, minor minister of Petain’s,
> Papa, who died in Algiers,
> two husbands on the same wall,
> and her priest know and conserve
> who she is. At evening,
> she waits for her game-show, knits,
> and the various precipitates
> that might in others form
> grief condense
> in her into a kind of happiness.
>
> Meanwhile on a louche
> affordable riviera, Bob
> from Leeds splashes on
> an execrable cologne
> that will, however, dissipate
> as mellow evening yields to the mild night.
> In this too he is fortunate,
> for the skirt
> he meets at the Irish place
> isn’t the usual hunting local wog
> but a nice girl, a sensible girl
> from Bristol. She likes
> that he isn’t the usual yob
> smashing the pub at the score;
> that his room has a bit of a view
> of the sea beyond other towers;
> that he’s attentive to her needs;
> and though, in the morning,
> they talk about meeting
> in London or again in Portugal,
> she knows that he’s as glad as she
> that he’s only Bob from Leeds.
>
> At Kinko’s and the pizza place
> where he makes his rent and meals,
> they think he’s some sort of nerd
> or geek. He feels
> the irony and the insult
> deeply, but doesn’t speak; he needs
> no computer or diploma
> or friend. He has
> his work, and all the books he steals,
> borrows, and sometimes solemnly buys
> for it. – Plotinus does not have
> the last word on the One. The split
> in the divine unconsciousness
> that Schelling posited before Creation
> implies plurality, in fact Pleroma:
> there will be gods. He’ll see to it.
> At dawn, his writing done,
> he likes to walk, immune from thugs,
> to a certain bench, in future days
> a shrine, gaze at Manhattan,
> and wrap his trembling arms around
> the meager frame Athena hugs.
>
> They’re happy because, well before
> the Novel disintegrated,
> they saw it coming. They forget:
> were they in the same one?
> Unlikely – probably not.
> It might have been interesting.
> But finally no hand of petty lives,
> however dealt, no eager jack or queen
> will save the great bourgeois genre,
> the bourgeoisie itself disintegrating.
> And so they migrated,
> freeing themselves from contact and from plot.
> Within what none may call
> unsentimentally a private hell,
> in the clean wind of non-comparison,
> they wear their fates and stories like a shell.
> Better like this; truer.
> With immortality on offer
> at a cheaper rate:
> not having to cooperate,
> and choosing one’s best side to be
> preserved in the hard vacuum of poetry.
>
>
> (Note: beurs - nasty French slang for Arab immigrants.)
--
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/
The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
--Corey Ford
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