A Few Old Things
by David Kirby

Rilke said he wanted a room “with a few old things
                        and a window opening onto great trees,” which makes
me think of my favorite rooms and their furnishings,
            an obvious choice being this brightly-lit bedroom,
                        newspapers and coffee cups on the floor, bedclothes
scattered everywhere, perfumed with the smell
                        of sex, maybe, or maybe not. And if not, okay;
 
            they’ve smelled of sex before and will again.
                        Well, probably. As Fats Waller said, “One never
knows, do one?” Then there’s the kitchen with
            a pizza in a blazing oven, perhaps, or a risotto
                        bubbling while you chop salad and blast Big Jack
Johnson on a pair of tinny speakers. Then it’s off
                        to the dining room and Chopin while you eat
 
            your jambalaya or cassoulet or whatever it was
                        you cooked, and now the living room, a fire
toppling as you sip eau de vie and toy with a cigar
            and listen to Penderecki’s Symphony no. 3,
                        the one he wrote for the war dead, the words sung
by soprano Dawn Upshaw, whose voice enters
                        the music so gradually that you don’t realize
 
            someone is singing until she all but cries out in joy
                        or terror, you’re not sure which. Now you’re
in the space between image and idea where Keats
            spent his happiest hours, skating back and forth
                        between some old book in your hand
and your memories of other books, of things you did
            when you were a kid or even last week and things
 
            other people told you they did, of your mother
                        and father, lovers you might have
treated better and ones who might have been nicer to you,
            friends you broke with even though
                        you can’t remember a single one,
historical figures—silly ones, like Thomas Taylor
            the Platonist, who invented a “perpetual lamp” fueled
 
            by oil, salt, and phosphorus that exploded during
                        his demonstration of it at the Freemasons’
Tavern in 1785 which, he noted ruefully, raised
            a prejudice against the device “which could never
                        afterwards be removed,” and merry ones, like
Don Juan of Austria who, just before the battle
            of Lepanto, was seized by “a fit of exuberance
 
            beyond rational thought” and danced a galliard
                        on the gun-platform of the command vessel
to the music of fifes. And all the while you’re thinking
            of tomorrow and of the things you have to do
                        and the ones you want to do, and you wonder
if it’d be better to have a list to make sure you don’t
            forget anything or if it’d be better just to get up
 
            and start working and in that way do the thing you
                        weren’t expecting to do, the one that doesn’t
appear on any list or even in your mind as you
            were dozing, waking, dozing again, the idea
                        that enters you like a cry in the night—one minute
you’re at a table in a tavern with your friends, it seems,
            and the next, you’re in the street, saying, Now what?

David Kirby, “A Few Old Things” from Get Up, Please. © 2016 Louisiana State University Press. (buy now)

It's the birthday of the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, born in Brookline, Massachusetts (1917), who said in one of his last major public speeches, "When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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