On the first of May, my mother told me about a poet who loved volcanoes and Persephone and had just disappeared on a small island in Japan. It was his passionate belief, she said, that poets should go to dangerous places and bring them back in writing; by the time she heard about him on the radio, he had been missing for three or four days, but they were still hoping that his story would end like one of hers, the goddess he cared so much about, and he would come back with pages like pomegranate seeds in his hands. My mother couldn't remember his name, so I looked him up. Craig Arnold. This afternoon, I found out he has been declared dead. Somewhere I hope someone who knew and loved him is writing him a poem in which Persephone and Pele and the kami of Kuchinoerabujima are listening to their praise singer, or making him into something that can slip into the earth's burning heart and back again. I don't have the right to. I just liked his words. The severed head of Orpheus kept on singing, afterward the way poets do.
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- 1: You brought me back a lemon and you squeezed me tight
- 2: Here we are half-awake
- 3: I was never there, I only read the book, I only saw the film
- 4: We just want to go to a stately home built in the Georgian style
- 5: Sit thee down and put them on
- 6: My life's a crooked mess of things I've broken with my head
- 7: ?פֿאַר װאָס זאָל איך אײַך געבן דירה-געלט אַז די קיך איז צעבראָכן
- 8: A second flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere
- 9: So Krishna stole the butter, did he?
- 10: When I invited Frank and you back to mine for a mange tout when I meant ménage à trois
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- Style: Classic for Refried Tablet by and
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