[The image is taken from the music video for "Blue Tomorrow," a song by the South Korean "boy-band" Super Junior.]
Time destroys, and is, itself, destroyed
Unfolding as the universe unpacks:
Omar Khayyam saw from strand to strand,
But could no more cross over
Than I, or you, or Moses atop Mount Pisgah. [Read more →]
I hold our stuffed dolphin,
Kiss her on the snout,
And remember our breakfast last year:
“The Cozy Kettle” was where we dined,
Tho’ the kettle was dented
With divots no hammer could clear.
We loved one another,
But your folks hated me,
And were grateful when you found a new man:
I tried to be graceful
But grace don’t come easy
When you lose the love you began.
So I and my dolphin will dine here alone
You know full well that I’ll overeat
And I’ll hoist my coffee, and propose a toast
To the woman who’s not in her seat.
~ Eu. O’Brien
Two hours of glorious YouTube surfing, from Edith Piaf, to Ella Fitzgerald’s “Miss Otis Regrets,” to Jose Feliciano’s (controversial) performance of the Star-Spangled Banner at a ballgame in the late ’60s, to Janis Joplin’s version of “Me and Bobby McGee,” to “Diamonds and Rust” by Joan Baez, to Wallace Stevens (and Harold Bloom) reading some of Stevens’ poetry. Only once I found myself watching Ali G. interviewing Noam Chomsky did I decide that diminishing returns had set in, and that it was time to call it a night!
A great blue heron flew by at eye level
between the maple branches today.
Rounded beach stones in concentric circles
remind me of my grandfather
for reasons not immediately apparent to me.
At the distant breakfast nook
he described wisps of community [Read more →]
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This poem was written the better part of a year ago. It seemed, for a time, to be premature, but ~ alas! ~ worked too well as a poem not to be true in life as well.
A pat on the back
And better luck next time…
~ The Dixie Chicks, “Heartbreak Town”
The songs of youth are wasted on the middle-aged
But older listeners sometimes hear the note
A silent bow draws from a violin
Remembering tunes their spirits know by rote. [Read more →]
The following poem was topical ~ in October of 2007, when J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, announced that she thought of Albus Dumbledore, the beloved Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, as homosexual. I dutifully submitted it to The Providence Journal, the newspaper from which I learned this, within twenty-four hours of the publication of the initial article. I’m afraid that they may have chosen to print some woman from Warwick whining about taxes instead ~ too often humorlessness is mistaken for seriousness.
I came upon a hardcopy of the poem completely by accident recently, and am still pleased at the quality of its workmanship, so I decided to publish it here.
And so it seems that our headmaster’s gay
Delighting queer folk here and far away
Confounding muggles of religious bent
Who like their boggarts in a wardrobe pent [Read more →]
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I’m tempted to be “cutesy” about this, but some of you might be coming in on the story halfway through, and get confused. The New York Times, together with The Manchester Guardian and Der Spiegel, today published reams of “secret” military information from Afghanistan, an event that has been compared to The Pentagon Papers. What made the information so “secret” was that as long as enough people kept shoveling enough sand over it [Read more →]
~ by Eugene O’Brien
As I write this essay, the movie Troy (2004), starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom, is being broadcast on the American Movie Classics network. I will not be watching it. I have it on the authority of a friend in Austin, a one-time graduate student in Greek and Latin at the University of Texas there, that the Trojan Paris kills the Greek Menelaus in it. My friend, who considers it a responsibility to see how classical culture is being re-imagined for each new generation, was beside himself with rage and disgust. Some revisions, such as the one reported in a fake news item on Saturday Night Live long ago, in which vandals had broken into the Louvre to glue arms onto the Venus de Milo, simply are not permissible. [Read more →]
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~ The Lessons of Plumbing, for One Who’s Thick as Lead, by Eugene O’Brien
My sister used to say that our father could fix anything: he’d just mix a scotch, and call the plumber or electrician. I, his son, have continued the not-so-proud tradition of domestic inutility, in spite of the somewhat puzzling presence in my past of a technical degree which has always fit me like a size-zero cocktail dress. Indeed, during the very few years that I labored at what was most definitely not my calling [Read more →]
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What follows is a slightly rewritten letter to Will Schwalbe, who attended my prep school the year after I did, back in the late 1970s. He became the president of his class, all the while worrying that his homosexuality would be discovered. He went on to serve as Editor-In-Chief at a prominent publisher in New York City, and is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the culinary site Cookstr. For a recent issue of the Alumni Horae, he put together his story with those of other gay men and women who attended the school in various decades.
Dear Will:
Thanks for creating the Horae article that you did. Most of the time, what is therapeutic for its writer is sheerest misery for its reader, but on the off-chance that my needs may intersect with the interests of some visitors to Snazzy Azzy, I am giving myself license to post this here.
I myself was sexually involved with another male student when I was at St. Paul’s, and though I wouldn’t call myself homosexual [Read more →]
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