THE RABBITS STRIKE AGAIN

There was a time when I could go to the statistics page of this thing and find that a Venezuelan, midway in life's course and finding herself lost in a dark forest (I believe wolves might have been involved too), had read this blog. Now she's vanished. I can only assume the rabbits have hidden her too. doing a better job than they did with Spain. She, Spain and, I suppose, the rabbits, are in our prayers. Meanwhile:

WS at the Chinese Buffet

As flies to wonton soup are we to the guards

If us they see at all they spoon us roughly forth

And benapkin our salty corpses with discretion.

Yet, atimes, the corpse proves itself false; not dead

But only numbed. Crawling from its whitish sepulchre

It tumbles down and down‘til intercepted belike

By trouser cuff decreed by some kind fate unsewn.

TWO POEMS FROM THE ARCHIVES

What shall I call him? Ten years further on

He’ll be my father but now, 1941, he is fifteen

At one in the morning, as usual

He is awake. The new day expects

To find him reading or thinking

Or raising a casual hand to welcome it.

In the kitchen, his mother sits rapt,

Reading a newspaper she has saved since 1924.

Real news endures though the pages are yellow.

In a few moments she’ll climb to the attic room

Bringing her youngest an apple, a cookie,

Some tea with lemon in a blue glass cup.

In 1905 in Dublin, New Hampshire

Patrick McAleer held a rabbit

I have seen the photograph of them

Captioned Patrick McAleer holding a rabbit

The rabbit – small, brown, alert -- looks untroubled;

He, though, would have called the picture

Rabbit in landscape, with McAleer.

It is hard to tell if McAleer is smiling

His enormous mustache hides his lips

But he is certainly calm; pleased, I think,

That he, the rabbit, the leafless trees behind them

Are so casually become immortal.

(Patrick McAleer was quite real, as was the rabbit. They both worked for Mark Twain. I suspect that McAleer was the Patrick who was Jonathan Swift's servant {see Journal to Stella, which you really should read} -- he has that look about him).

Rabbits and Spain. Also Ghent

Questions multiply. I still haven’t figured out why the rabbits wanted to hide Spain, nor why they didn’t succeed better. Of course, it may be that they succeeded far better than any of us know, and the Spain we see is merely a small portion of the Spain we don’t. This blog has been accessed nine times by people in Germany – perhaps one person who keeps making the same mistake, typing “Shrewsburyclock.blogspot.com,” when he or she means to type “catvideos.org” – and one Venezuelan. If a German is willing to look into this question of what the rabbits are up to, the Venezuelan might be willing to translate.

Meanwhile, another poem from Ghent.

They tell you, when you begin in Ghent

The most junior Tourist Bureau employee

That you must never show surprise.

No one plans to visit Ghent

Yet somehow there are tourists

Each and every one of whom

Has taken a wrong turning.

Some missed the left at Alberquerque;

Others, midway in life’s journey

In a dark forest, paused

And Vergil passed them by.

Not Hell do they visit; only Ghent.

Help them make the best of it and never

Say what brought you here.