Shall I call up the crafts of conservation: lemon and brandy, honey and sunshine, salt and wine, the lava and ice which slew and saved the sabertooth; marooned Pompeii’s indulgent daily life on an isle out of time? Should I muster all the ancient arts of preservation: disembowelment, embalmment, mummification? the dry stone tomb, Etna’s immortalizing crater? Can my crabby complaints, my discontents, be stored like grain against that unlikely lean year when there is a famine in misfortune? Can my curses be kept calm in a cool cellar; my harvest of sour grapes tanned like a vintage; and can all my cruelty of mind come powdered in a package like dried milk or Jell-O? During the Depression, when my family bought canned fruits and vegetables by the case in order to save, it was my job to arrange our hoard on shelves in the basement. But is there anything in life now I wish to Leninize, so mobs may march by and be edified; anything I would like to bottle and lay down for the next decade to enjoy? Have I some favorite fish to barrel, smoke, bury in brine, release in an ocean of oil? Flounce from your stew, you sluttish muse, and bring me a pleasant subject. It is true, too, that fragments from the great artistes come high: a tone of voice, a flash of tinsel, the place a graceful shadow fell, a cough, a vibrant stride. Relics are also dear, though there’s still no absence of supply: towers which have been shrunk to the size of infant Eiffels, rolled out upon postcards, blown in hankies. With one of those I’ve wiped off all my tears. Yes, fragments from the great artistes come high, but I know where to buy my first kiss—yours as well as mine now—in the liplike shape of an ashtray, or find a tantrum tie-dyed as a scarf, or a youthful ideal to put up as a pennant.

O sing O muse—cognate with mind and all the acts pertaining

(though in truth you muzzle too, you mock, you jest and tease, you cause us to gape and loiter, to lose every decent sense of time, to stray from the normal gnaw and chew of everyday, from the honest toil, the peaceful sleep, the customary healthy shit and needful screw of ordinary life, to slip into the silent empire of Elea: full, round, reasonable, yet for all that, quite insane)—

O brood O muse upon my mighty subject like a holy hen upon the nest of night

(that endless dungeon of air which held pure extinction prisoner till the word released it by striking the first light, and on that order, out of Nothing, nothing came);

O ponder the fascism of the heart

(that “glorious phrase”);

Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean’s salt seems thinly shaken, of letdowns local as the sofa where I copped my freshman’s feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking.