Most days, I

just don't really have anything to say. I have good poems to share, though. So that is what I shall do. Writing in verse is so hard to do.

This poem was in the latest New Yorker, and I like it a lot, though I'm not entirely sure I get it completely:

Rat Wheel, Dementia, Mont Saint Michel

My last god's a theodicy glutton, a good-evil gourmet--
peacock and plague, gene-junk; he gobbles it down.
Poetry, violence; love, war--his stew of honey and thorn.

For instance, thinks theodicy-god: Mont Saint Michel.
Sheep, sand, steeple honed sharp as a spear. And inside,
a contraption he calls with a chuckle the rat wheel.

Thick timber three metres around, two persons across,
into which prisoners were inserted to trudge, toil,
hoist food for the bishop and monks; fat bishop himself.

The wheel weighs and weighs. You're chained in; you toil.
Then they extract you. Where have your years vanished?
What difference? says theodicy-god. Wheel, toil: what difference?

theodicy-god has evolved now to both substance and not.
With handy metaphysical blades to slice brain meat from mind.
For in minds should be voidy wings choiring, not selves.

This old scholar, for instance, should have to struggle to speak,
should not remember his words, paragraphs, books:
that garner of full-ripened grain must be hosed clean.

Sometimes as the rat wheel is screaming, theodicy-god
considers whether to say he's sorry: That you can't speak,
can't remember your words, paragraphs, books.


Sorry, so sorry. Blah, his voice thinks instead, blah.
He can't do it. Best hope instead they'll ask him again
as they always do for forgiveness. But what if they don't?

What might have once been a heart feels pity, for itself, though,
not the old man with no speech--for him and his only scorn.
Here in my rat wheel, my Mont Saint Michel, my steeple of scorn.

-C.K. Williams