Ode
Beauty is true pain —
and all this you need to know:
that fading as the day,
that fading as the sun,
truth foretells its death in telling,
beauty at the winning, having won.
The Children's Choir Does Karaoke God Rap
and claps out of time, swaying awkwardly,
chanting incomprehensibly. If I didn't know
better, I'd swear it was Latin. Perhaps
it was an over-developed sense of humiliation
that drove me from it early, the side-effect
of the scrutiny of being youngest. Give up
being cute, children: the sooner you lose
that doe-eyed dopeyness that passes for adorable
the sooner you get on with being left alone
by well-meaning, regretful adults. Their sad
need to see you demeaned means they don't
recall that to be a child is not innocence —
it is ignorance. They are afraid of what
they know. Cast away your cuteness so you
can be alone to pursue your own pure, your own
corrupting knowledge.
Faculty Meeting, 30 October 2001 (Lumberjack)
In a column labeled "Lumberjack"
there appears this line:
f' (2) ONE.
From this I can divine absolutely nothing.
I see here no plaid flannel, no axes
nor adzes, no log splitters nor wailing
chainsaws. I smell here no cedar, feel
no itchy chips fall down my back. I see
white chalk on a green board. But
there it is, the line, fading into nothing.
— Lael Ewy '95/99
