"Think of being them," he writes, Philip Larkin, the poem, Toads Revisited, "turning over their failures by some bed of lobelias, nowhere to go, but indoors..."  I turn to YouTube, remembering it, as I watch late night Maryland Public Television, a show from the early nineties, "Literary Visions."  Half watching it, an invalid from tree pollen and a cold, I find myself seeing Benjamin DeMott speaking from his office, in Johnson Chapel, much as I remember it, stacks of books piled this way and that.  Thank you, Fran Dorn, and the Annenberg CPB Project.  My old teacher, now, seven years dead?

It seems, or is it me, a bit dated, this interest in reading and explicating poetry.  Life seems more a matter of staying employed.  What the banks are up to, what's going on in China...  The great golden calf, The Global Economy...  The environment, suffering with each blow.  What does a poem have to do with that?  And here is Larkin, on work itself.  "Give me your arm, old toad.  Help me (pause) down cemetery road," reading it himself on some old British documentary found on YouTube.

Poets need their jobs, lest they fall into the vacuum, take it all too seriously.  Time off, seems desirable, but all you manage is cooking rice and a vegetable, a wash of whites, work shirts to hang out of the dryer, a nap.  One is reminded of Lincoln's advice to a distant relative who asked for some help, to quit the drink, forgive yourself, and find steady, constant employment.

A meeting at work.  The French waiter had bitched to the chef in the midst of a Saturday night about an overcooked little iron dish of escargot.  The oven door, by this point has opened so often that it's hard to find an even temperature, an even cooking time.  "I can't go into the oven and cook the snails," the chef explains, and I smile, and I totally agree.  Finally, at the end of the meeting, I remind us all of the chef before our friend was chef, how this guy no one remembers spoke to people, the psychological atmosphere he created with his sneers about how he didn't care what we thought, us front of the house, servers.  I remember.  And for a time, the hot heads calm down, stop beating the issue like a dead horse.

The boss thanks me, as I put away a case of Pessac Leognan in the wine room shelves.  French himself, he knows the habit of loud argument.  Once he had a brilliant story of the car rental counter in Europe, noting that in America, everyone stays in line.

What will I do, at this stage of life, but work it out, basically doing more of the same, with the odd hours, the restlessness, the pleasure of having no boss breathing down your neck.  Have I made my choice, then to dig in, even as it's a life that admits no others.  Thursday night, I might have wanted to go check out some music, but once home, with groceries, the energies waned, into a retreat.

Why do I write this crap?  Because, as in Aubade, there is that fine moment we all get.  "I work all day and get half-drunk at night."

For some, that's the battle of the work week, the night shift pitching me forward into night itself, such that I know the morning light as the time to go to back to bed, having two naps earlier.  My body's clock, I suppose.


In actuality, we like advertising and advertisements.  We wouldn't know what to do without them.  We'd feel empty.  We crave them.  Try and go a minute without, and you'll feel lost.  So we allow the look at the latest email, "Two Days Only, Buy One Suit, Get Three Free."  Perhaps for the poetry of them as we shift either toward or away from sleep.  Calmed, as if by a drug.

But if you were to play the game in that email, and make yourself famous or important, then you are only buying in to something deeply fake about that which is most real, the true self.  You'd have to create an ego that took something unimportant seriously, like cupcakes.  Or war.

This is why I'm glad not to be proud of being an English major, and take it as a notch above or below the water's surface, unimportant stuff, except when it floods or when there is a drought.