The Pathetic Fallacy
—an excerpt
The Saint Meets His Match, The Saint Goes Underground,
Pope’s translation of The Aeneid,
The Collected Trollop, the last five issues of Baseball Digest,
a whole library of French semanticists
piled on the hospital bed,
on the bed table. If he was going to be attached
to machines, tubes running into all kinds of places
on him, he refused to suffer
alone. He brought Sir Philip Sydney for company,
Samuel Daniel, Edmund Waller,
and the entire sixteenth century.
Coleridge shared his bed along with Flannery O’Conner
and John Woolman. If he ever was going to indulge himself,
what better time? Piled on the Bureau:
The Lysistrata, The Inferno (in three translations), Paradise Lost,
and The Life and Death of Buddy Holly,
books heaped so high
it looked as if he was conducting an experiment
to test precisely how long before everything collapses.
by Christopher Bursk
from The Last Inhabitants of Arcadia
University of Arkansas Press, 2006
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