The Metaphysics of Fire
Jan 28 3014


It's too cold
even for dogs.
Who wait by the door
with a predator’s patient calm,
enveloped in breath, ears erect
alert for motion.

Whose wet persistent noses

push hungrily in
through the narrow aperture,
frugally inched
against the arctic blast.
Bee-line
to the stove's hypnotic heat,

where they sprawl on the floor

like abstract art,

body parts

inter-twined, and overlapped.
Where they stretch, lick, yawn,

meticulously tongue
matted coats, ice-slicked paws,

a heap of well-used rugs

in motley browns
shades of black.
And wag for treats,

an entitlement

as automatic as breathing.

They have never felled, split, hauled
or piled.
Have no notion
of combustion science,

ignition, fuel, fire.

All they know
is the house if warm, the outside cold.

And that we all belong inside,
this blended family
of 2-legged creatures
and them

looking up from theirs,

who can't count, anyway.
Which is as it's always been
since they were tiny mewling pups,
deaf and blind
and first opened their eyes
to us.

The metaphysics of fire
the great given of life.
No question asked
explanation required.

I've gone a little dry recently: writing poorly; and not much new to say, or needs saying. So what else to do but defer to my usual basic defaults: weather poems, and dog poems. Here, I've managed to include both!

Dogs live in the present. They do not agonize over meaning, metaphysics, identity. Life is as given; and they accept, no question.

The poem began with me wondering what my dog thinks when she watches me light a fire. Am I a magician, a god, who can strike heat and light from a small wooden stick? Or does the question even arise? Does the exercise of such agency even make sense to her? Because I think lighting a fire involves the same kind of indirect agency as the TV remote -- action at a distance, an inexplicable connection between act and result, which I'm positive she'll never get.

And it also began with me wondering: does she ever consider who and what I am, and why I have always been here, with her? Or consider the source of her providence: the fridge, the bag of kibble, the central heat? Of course she doesn't! And it's not that I want her to be as caught up in her head as I am in mine; I'm just wondering if there's a glimmer of introspection. The real truth is that I envy the blithe serenity of her acceptance; her perfect complacency with things as they are. (Not to mention envy her obliviousness to death. Although this envy comes with some ambivalence, since isn't it foreknowledge of death that gives life its urgency and sweetness?)

So this poem is about the world view of a dog. It's about the life of comfort and ease -- where the house is warm and the fire lit, and where the expected treat always materializes -- that I am privileged and pleased to give her.

( ...Although perhaps I'm insufficiently grateful, because I suppose there are insecure and neurotic dogs who seem to worry and second guess as much as we humans do!)

Empty Vessel
Jan 26 2014


When everything was possible
and there was all the time in the world.

When you were newly born,
and older brothers
tried hard to ignore
the whole calamity.
When grandmothers cooed
and dads looked confused,
and bachelor uncles
stiffly cradled you,
an empty vessel
for the many dreams, and hopes
they had, themselves
let go of.

In the relay race
of generations
the baton had been handed off.

Which is not so much a sprint

as a steady slog,

a meandering track

circling back on itself.

When soon

they'll be dropping back, one-by-one

slow to a walk

eventually stop,

hands on knees, breathing hard.

As you go running on
alone.

When even you will tire.
And come to realize

that no one who knew
the youthful you

still exists;

so no one knows you, anymore
if anyone ever did.
As if one could truly know

anyone else.

And realize

you are the custodian of memory;
so when you forget
there will be no one left to ask
what actually happened
or if.
 

And realize
you did not live up

to their impossible hopes,
disappointed even yours.

When the past will exist
all at once,
because chronology
is a mere formality
an old man is allowed to say the hell with.

Like everything else
that seemed so important

in head-long life,
to the restive youth, the man in his prime.
If only he had been told, back then
were such a terrible
waste of time.

Trudge
Jan 20 2014


Snowshoes have packed the trail,
so it's easy, making my way
in puffy winter boots.

I walk
raised above the rock, and underbrush.
Where I would have stumbled, last summer,
or been stuck
in the sucking mud of spring,
one foot half-out of its heel.
All I see is white,
but underneath

the beautiful leaves persist,

the weight of snow
and the slow heat
of decomposition
warming dormant soil.

To either side, the powder is deep,
tightly bunched tress

impassable.
I find myself stuck
on a pre-determined path,
circling back
to where I'd begun
on this narrow well-packed trail.

So I walk
in lock-step,
following the crowd
on its familiar path,
feel reassured
by force of habit.
We all thought we'd grow up
to be non-conformist
would find our authentic voice.
But now we trudge,
say we have no choice.

The dog darts off,
sniffing, burrowing
porpoising through the snow.
While my mind drifts into words,
picking at knots
in a tangled poem,
immersed
in a thicket of verse.

She goes easily
where I would founder,
is here and now
where I am absent.
Automatically,
one foot after
the next.

Playing War
Jan 16 2014


Don't all boys play war?
Sometimes "guns"
or cowboys and Indians
or Russian toughs.
Although Nazis, not so much,

even though they are the perfect bad guys.

Pure evil, after all

must always lose,

notwithstanding

cool uniforms, Hitler salutes.

Any fallen branch
becomes a gun.
Or just a hand,
elbow locked, fingers cocked
a cool eye narrowed.
Where dying is the most fun,

hamming it up, and on-and-on
and death is only so long
according to the agreed upon
rules of war.

Even us
blessed to have grown up here,
in the peaceable kingdom, the frozen north.
With moms who hated guns,
and great uncles, who once

had shot them.

Had fought the good fight, but never talk.

And have that faraway look in their eyes,

still sleepless nights

40 years on.

On TV, I see refugee kids

in barren camps, where they range unschooled
play with such ferocity, and focus
I feel a chill.
Who may very well kill

or be killed

before they'll have come of age
or shaved
or flirted with girls.
Children with Kalashnikovs,
who have only known a world
of well-armed men

and eager boys.

Who learn early, and well

the small difference that divides

enemy, from tribe.

Who are too young

to understand death,
but will die, nevertheless.

Who are proclaimed heroes, and martyrs
then laid to rest
to the rending of garments, the tearing of hair,

ululations

of triumph, and grief.

While angry brothers

stand straight, and stoical,
hysterical mothers

clutch daughters close.

Who will soon be watching
younger sons

playing guns;

powerless
to make them stop.

After the Storm
Jan 12 2014


In the long slog of winter
we defer to nature,
who can be biblical, in her wrath,
instructing us
in humility.

In long laborious winter
we yawn, rub our eyes,
toy with giving in
to hibernation.
Blood thickens, skin pales
appetite quickens
and sleep overtakes,
as we struggle against
our animal nature.

In the long night of winter
we turn to making love,
numb extremities
coming back to life.

Cocooned in heavy comforters, and hungry for touch
we cling to each other,

the heat of naked bodies

one on one.

We are creatures of the night
with great luminous eyes,
bundled-up
in the stillness of snow.
We drift through shadows
in shapeless clothes,
caught outside
after the storm.

Or retreat indoors;
ravenous, carnivorous
in lascivious warmth.

This poem had so many false starts, blind alleys, and dead ends, I'm surprised it amounted to anything. But I kept picking away at it (which felt a lot like good money after bad), and once I realized I had to re-order the stanzas, push the refrain a bit harder, and smooth off a few rough bits, it suddenly started to work. So while it may not be great, I'm pretty pleased with it, knowing how weak the earlier versions were.

I've written a few poems along the same theme, many years ago. They may be better. Which is rather dispiriting, since I'd like to think my work is improving with time, not regressing. On the other hand, even if the whole is not seamless, I know there are parts I wouldn't have been able to pull off before, because I suspect I would have been too wordy, or too tangential; or said too much, or been too clever (the show-off rhyme, the big word.) Which, I suppose, is progress of a sort.

Marginalia

Jan 10 2014

Spines stiffen
paper yellows
ink fades.

The hard-cover edition
was supposed to be permanent,
the printed word, out-live us.

Day after day
exposed to sun, collecting dust.
Its pages exhale
that old book smell
of vinegar, and must.

Used books
have been touched by human hands;

the residue of sweat,

dead skin

impressed on the page.

Before we met

you left part of yourself.
Marginalia
in red ball-point pen,
the cramped script
even you
found barely legible.
And your usual exclamation marks,

as if trying to shake some sense

into the rest of us.
When you were impossibly young,
a fresh-faced girl
out to change the world,
as if you were the first
to have tried.

A coffee stain
that passed your lips,

a dog-eared page

you folded in,
a bookmark slipping out.
Which means I’ve lost your place
in a book you never finished.
The unformed girl
who will never return,
the cynical woman
who can't.

Your words
never meant to last,
placed carefully back on the shelf.


A friend gave me a used book, and on opening it I was immediately struck by that familiar sensation: the decomposing smell of acidic paper. Although used books have character, and can be great finds, and appeal to my dislike of waste, there is also something a bit unseemly and unhygienic about them. You don't know where they've been, or who has held them, or what unpleasant surprises they might contain.

But this tactility is also the strength of a real physical book; especially in contrast with the e-book, which is forever pristine and can never contain any history. The same goes for a real letter as opposed to email: someone you loved actually touched that paper; and there is their idiosyncratic script, applied to the page by their own hand.

So this poem is about opening an old book that's been forgotten on its shelf, and of the shock of recognition: the hand-writing of someone who has gone, the intimacy of their private thought suddenly present. Instead of the vaguely distasteful feeling I got on cracking the spine of that used book, the feeling here is of bittersweet pleasure and sentimental nostalgia; as well as a melancholy reflection on impermanence and loss.

I think the woman in this poem isn't just an old flame who has gone out of his life; I think she has passed away too young. And there is a bit of foreshadowing that makes this more likely: the decrepitude of stiff spines and yellowing paper; the impermanence of a book, which we like to think would confer a kind of posterity on a writer; the molecules of dead skin. (I also had the coffee stain "interred on the page", but that line was dropped in editing.) I've been thinking lately of my old friend Dorothy, who died violently and far too young. Perhaps this was working on my subconscious as I wrote.

Percolate
Jan 9 2014


Before the morning ritual.
Before the hot brown liquid
in its heavy mug.
Before the caffeinated buzz,
I loved
the smell of fresh ground coffee.

Supermarkets were modest, back then,
not much bigger than a storefront
sandwiched-in
to a busy city strip.
Shopping day,
and I was just a kid, tagging along.

In the A&P, there was a big red machine,
conjuring up

that heady aroma
from darkly roasted beans – 
into the funnel

hard brown nubs, circling down
steel grinders, revving up

with the smooth powerful sound

of heavy machinery.
Until fresh grounds came pouring out
in a silky stream
I breathed-in, and in
long, and deep.
And imagined how it would be
to drink such ambrosia.

The entire store
was redolent
of freshly ground,
the stingy aisles, and dark linoleum floor,
men in hats, who mostly smoked.
The sturdy cashier,
punching in each price
one-handed
on a big clattering machine,
before scanners
and muted beeps.

The rite of passage
in my early teens
to the grown-up drink,
percolating in slowly building burps
to its frenzied beat,
hints of bitter, a little burned.
The intoxicating smell
of freshly ground beans,
infusing the kitchen with warmth.


Now, of course, it's a health food, apparently full of virtuous anti-oxidants. And we are able to be reassured it's fair trade, and organic. And it's made in a filter, or gently pressed; never recirculated, boiled, or burned. So we have better coffee, but have lost the sensuous sound of the perk, as well as the redolence of percolating coffee that used to fill the house.

I have no idea why I loved that smell so much: at such a young age, and before I had ever even tasted. All I know is I couldn't wait to be permitted to drink the stuff. And even though it was bitter, at first, and probably smelled better than it tasted, I wasn't disappointed; in fact, enthusiastic enough to have always taken it black: uncompromised, unadulterated.

Of course, the taste alone hardly explains our love of coffee. It's the buzz of caffeine that does it: the powerful association of caffeine with all the other attributes of coffee -- its taste and smell and heat and colour, and even its ritual -- that ingrains our desire. In other words, coffee and the caffeine that goes with it is a kind of genteel and socially acceptable addiction.

I recently learned that bees remember their flowers better under the influence of caffeine. It's a memory drug. Which is good for plants, and so explains why some have been selected through evolution to manufacture caffeine, despite the metabolic cost of making such a complicated chemical. And which explains the well-known buzz of caffeine on its human drinkers: why we feel more alert and creative with caffeine on board, why we learn better under its influence. Most of the chemical plants produce are toxins, intended to repel predatory insects and grazing animals (the neurotoxin nicotine, for example). But to reproduce, plants also have to attract pollinating creatures. So it's no accident that a chemical randomly found in certain plants works so well in an animal brain. All coffee drinkers should be grateful for the reproductive imperative and subtle intelligence of plants! ...I was going to try to get this idea into the poem, but it really didn't work: it was starting to sound more like a fun fact in a science textbook than poetry. Although, in a way, caffeine is in all my poems: after all, I can't imagine a better performance enhancing drug for writers (notwithstanding all the alcoholics who have won the Nobel for literature!)

The poem is also a bit of an exercise in nostalgia. Even when I was in university, which would have been the late 70s, I remember those small downtown supermarkets, which were a little dingy, and not much bigger than a modern convenience store; certainly nothing like the gigantic supermarkets of today, anchoring vast suburban malls: bright and airy food emporiums that are stocked to over-flowing, and full of exotic offerings. And earlier than that (late 50s, early 60s or so) when men wore hats and people smoked everywhere; and when cash registers clattered at the hands of strong-armed ladies, and the shelves had just the basics, like cans of peas and sliced white bread. There were no UPCs, no ingredient lists, no nutritional information, and no generic (or store) brands. I could have gone on with this (as I'm doing here!), but restrained myself; which is always a good thing in poetry.

Stagecraft

Jan 8 2014

An actor constructs himself
from the outside in.

It starts backstage,
where the costume mistress
plucks it off the rack,
make-up stained
and stinking of old sweat.
Which you will inhabit, temporarily,
scripted, and blocked
the audience lost
in the footlights' blinding glare.
Comforting yourself
to imagine them all

undressed.

Sometimes, a reflection catches your eye,
and for a moment
you can't tell who.

Sometimes, you hover in the flies,
looking down
on your disembodied self.

Sometimes, you are hollow inside,
nothing left
of the soft-bodied creature
but its exoskeleton,
your hard protective shell.

And there will come a time
when you go dry.
When the blood
rushing past your ears
drowns out the prompter's panicked words.
When you say what you've always thought
ad lib,
in the inner voice
too rarely heard.

And when the curtain drops
what you should have done from the start.
Flesh out
the bare bones script,
the inner life

of back-story, motivation

id.

When you shed
your perfect disguise,

in a heap on the green room floor.
When you dress yourself
from the back of the closet,
the call of fashion ignored.

Or in hand-me-downs,
accepting the baggage

and civil wars.
When the big stage door
swings shut behind you
locking from the inside,
and you walk clean away.

Because your understudy
can fake it just as well.


I heard someone describe an article of clothing, or some kind of accessory (a purse, perhaps?) as a "signifier". We present ourselves in a very calculated way, constructing an image. (Even I -- dressing for comfort, with no thought to status or affiliation or artifice -- make a clear impression. Although in my case, a rather authentic one of total oblivion!)

I've also heard many actors talk about constructing a character from the outside in: how powerful a transformation they undergo simply by slipping into a costume or under a wig; how a simple disguise protects, emboldens, liberates. And then, of course, there is the old saying "the clothes make the man." (Which, to me, is another way of saying there can't be much of a man there!)

The appearance we project to the world can be confidence-building. It can be a powerful instrument of personal re-invention. But it can also trap us: in conformity and convention; in fear and superficiality. The more authentic interior life can be denied or neglected. You can feel like a fake and an impostor, in a prison of your own making.

So in this poem, the actor on stage and in costume is a metaphor for the unexamined life. Which is a lot more enjoyable way for the reader to hear what I just said without descending into the preachiness and sanctimony that would be all too easy here.

Making Merry
Jan 5 2014

In the first week of the new year
Christmas lights
are looking weary.
They remind me of wrapping paper
scattered beneath the tree,
where needles are shedding, and listing unsteady
like a tipsy uncle
well into the ‘nog.

Where snow-banks have narrowed the streets,
so high
you creep ahead
at every intersection,
gingerly peering right, then left.
The roads are a mess 
of salt and grit,
dirty slush in frozen ridges.

The resolutions
that felt so optimistic
have gone flat as champagne
the morning after
the ball was dropped.
But next week
will be a fresh start
you promise yourself,
because it's always the first day
of the rest of your life,
so what's the hurry?

In the depths of winter
we wish a "Merry Christmas"
and hope to make merry ourselves.
A peculiar word
conjuring twinkling eyes, and mirthful bellies
that would draw strange looks
anytime else.

That now, in the holiday aftermath

seems odder, still,

exhausted
by too much jollity,
the endless dark, and grimy snow.
When the cheerful lights
seem to try too hard;
all night long, blinking unwatched,
and then left on, because no one bothered
in the washed-out light
of dawn. 

Christmas lights left on all day look dull, lonely, neglected. Instead of adding cheer, they emphasize the bleakness of mid-winter. And as the year goes on, the displays get tired and their cheerfulness seems forced.

This is similar to the New Year celebration itself, which has an obligatory quality to it: the expectation you'll spend too much money, get too drunk, and must take part in this conventional notion of "fun". Not to mention it's an artificial celebration of an arbitrary date on the calendar.

And it's similar to the irony of this peculiar word "merry", which we attach exclusively to Christmas. The exhortation also seems forced. And the heightened expectations of this holiday season can, ironically, make it the least "merry" of times. There is the financial pressure; the unattainable ideal of family life; the loneliness, for some; and for others, the teeth-gritting closeness to difficult relatives with whom we would never otherwise spend time. Just because it seems less arch and artificial, I prefer the British "Happy Christmas" to the North American "Merry".

And it all happens in the middle of winter, which a lot of people find hard and wearing.

The only auto-biographical part of this poem is my impression of the lights, and the experience of city driving in the accumulation of snow. (Which is the second stanza, and which I think a good editor might urge me to throw out entirely, since it's tangential and distracting, and its only contribution is the bridging of "ridges" with the cleverly rhymed "optimistic".) I don't observe Christmas, and the excess of the New Year's celebration has always left me indifferent. And I actually like winter: I enjoy the cold, and the long dark night is a great opportunity to hibernate around a warm fire -- "endless dark, and grimy snow" notwithstanding!

Live Wires
Jan 3 2014


Thin black wires
strung along the road
seem to hum, in summer,
drooping, from pole-to-pole
as if overcome
by heat.

In winter, they look frigid
dripping icicles, limned with snow,
brittle enough to snap
in the first stiff wind.
Live wires,
dangling, dancing
showering sparks.

Plunged into darkness,
and a dense silence
with its own dark weight
that made all the absent sounds
of a humdrum house
uncomfortably loud.
When a truck hit the shoulder
took out a pole
blacking us out.
When a storm
ripped down the wires,
like a flimsy clothesline, overloaded,
helter-skelter

on the ground.

They are always there
as I drive along,
straight wooden poles
regular as clockwork
I long ago stopped noticing.

Grim sentries

at attention

no matter what the weather.

And their wires, overhead

are flimsy life-lines,
like the thin thread

of contingency
on which everything depends.
The bad decision

and split-second difference.

The near miss, and sheer coincidence,
the critical bit

you couldn't predict.

In white-out conditions

of wind-driven snow.

The intersection
of quiet country roads.

That patch of ice,
crossing the centre-line
out of control.

The poem ends with an impending head-on collision, an example of the improbable intersections in time and space that can dramatically change a life 180 degrees.

This isn't the first time I've written about contingency, or used the "thin thread" analogy. Perhaps it comes to mind again because I've been binge-watching the first few season of the great HBO series Six Feet Under. Each episode begins with a mundane event in some random life. The viewer knows they will die unexpectedly in the next few minutes. And it is because they're normal people doing everyday things that we so easily identify, that we are so poignantly reminded of life's frailty: the arbitrary contingency, "the bad decision(s) and split-second difference(s) ...and sheer coincidence(s)" that stalk our every move.

When I sat down to write and was trying to think of something from the boring narrative of my own life to get me started, I thought about driving my familiar country road, and a picture came to mind of the overhead wires that run along it: in this extreme cold, a thin black line set against January's bleak snow. This led me to recall one of our numerous black-outs, in this case a bit of mystery because there was no high wind or freezing rain or lightning -- the usual causes. Apparently, the unexpected cause was a truck running into a hydro pole.

So all this comes together in the poem, with consequences that escalate from a downed clothesline to downed power lines to instant death. And where that thin black line of electric wires is a metaphor for the lifeline, the "thin thread/ of contingency/ on which everything depends."

I'm concerned that the poem takes a sudden turn in the last stanza: that the dire ending comes out of nowhere; which is at best a kind of cheating, and at worst leaves the reader confused. But if it works, it's because of those 3 crucial lines in the 3rd stanza, which are a kind of foreshadowing: "when a truck hit the shoulder/ took out a pole/ blacking us out." So instead of coming out of the blue, the ending is more of a call-back, and the poem coheres.

Slow Dance
Jan 1 2014


The moon was once 6 times as bright.
A second dawn

when it was full, and rising.

6 times as large,
a giant orb, tipping the horizon

tempting you to touch.

How claustrophobic, 6 times as close,
filling the sky
like an unblinking eye
interrogating earth.

And instead of the brilliant void
we would have felt alone,
its powerful light
blotting out the stars,
reducing space
to a milky glow.

When a day on earth
was hours shorter,
a younger planet
spinning faster, back then.
Because the earth and moon
are like slow dancers, holding hands;
the moon
tugging for distance
as it leans into its spin,
while the planet's invisible grip
bleeds it of speed.

We think of the heavens as fixed,
eternal background
to our brief chaotic lives.
Like the night we walked
under a full moon
hand-in-hand,
leaving footprints, in cool sand
where high water
would soon level everything.
Never imagining
that in the distant past
we would have been far out to sea,
a swollen moon, and its massive tide
leaving no trace.

Before the two circling bodies
let slip.
Before moon and earth
drifted apart,
began
their slow inexorable split.


I heard this about the moon and earth on a recent RadioLab episode (a very popular podcasts from the public radio station WNYC, out of New York): that days used to be shorter and the moon closer; and that it was the interplay of gravity between the planet and its satellite that, over time, both slowed the earth and propelled the moon further out.

I think the analogy of two dancers was theirs. Or did they use throwing a ball?!! Anyway, I like the idea that what we regard as reassuringly permanent is nothing but. And I like a clockwork cosmos imagined as a kind of slow dance: these massive heavenly bodies in ponderous majestic motion; and the fixed laws of physics and invisible bonds of gravity and precise exchange of energy that tie them together. ...I'm hearing the music of the spheres, and getting visions of Stanley Kubrik's 2001!

But a "physics" poem that simply restates this fact in fancier language would be of no interest to anyone, except as a stylistic exercise. To make the poem worth reading, I needed to somehow humanize and personalize it. So the moon and earth become a metaphor for a couple that is also drifting apart. The metaphor can even be read into the beginning of the poem, which -- at least on re-reading -- becomes more foreshadowing than mere description: trying to touch, but being out of reach; the interrogation, like a suspicious spouse giving her partner the 5th degree; the feeling of being alone amongst all the stars in the sky. (Although I confess I didn't write it with this in mind. In fact didn't even know the poem would for in this direction when I came up with the first few stanzas. So, have I become the earnest student, eager to impress his teacher by torturing meaning and symbolism out of an innocent poem? Am I trying too hard to make a whole out of what is really 2 different poems?)

I think the other thing going on here is the perception of time: the unimaginable slowness of geological and astronomical time, set against our own fleeting lives. So what seems permanent is not; and what seems crucial is utterly insignificant: we are footprints in the sand, and ultimately leave no trace.

Ghost Ship
Dec 31 2013


The Titanic's sister ship
crossed without incident,
lasted 20 years
on the North Atlantic run.
I read that the rivets were bad
on the ill-fated vessel.
Or she was pushed too fast,
behind schedule
on her fêted maiden trip.

No one cries
for Olympic
the forgotten sibling.
As no one remembers
the well-behaved son,
who found a steady job, a dutiful wife
soldiered on.
But we can't take our eyes
off the spoiled child,
the evil twin
scheming sister.

You can chug back and forth
between the same 2 ports
in a milk-run life.
Or you can go off course
spectacularly
and be immortalized,
the charming rogue
who died tragically young.

But who has time
for the iceberg?
That played its part, then floated off

scarred, and listing,

shrinking bit-by-bit

drifting south.
Yet still exists
diffusing thinly around the world,
its molecules
in every drop of sea.


This poem began as a playful exercise, having been given an idea (in this case, a piece by Adam Gopnik in the Jan 6 2014 New Yorker), and then seeing where it would take me. I think it ends up having something to say about posterity. You can take your choice: the spectacular, or the mundane.

But I also think -- in the indifference of the iceberg, and its version of immortality -- the poem puts humans hubris up against the force of nature.

And the poem also says something about the nature of attention, as well as those who seek it. There is the boringly dutiful son, and then there is the charming rogue. We commemorate Titanic, but few take notice of Olympic. And no one gives the slightest thought to the iceberg: a bland generic thing, no matter how instrumental an actor it was in the tragic tale.