POETS Day! Thomas Gray

A can of Publix Whole Peeled Tomatoes is, per the label, 1 lb. 12 oz. I’ve read that the height of Mount Everest was an embarrassing 29,000 feet at the peak. New measurements have it at around 29,032 feet but earlier it has been listed as 29,000 and that lead to justifiable doubts about the measurements because the number was too round. How high was Hillary?

The surface of the third shelf of my pantry is three feet exactly from the floor. That seems embarrassingly exact, but I have tools and stuff. Immediacy is hard to quantify in most incidents. It may have been that the falling time was a tenth or a twentieth of a second. Whether you take my measurement as exact about the shelf height, you need to include a pre-swollen wife’s foot. I realize the faulty calculations because I’m incapable of determining the three-foot thing since my wife has at least two inches of bones, tendons, and muscle between can and floor, but I gather that the can accidently disturbed in a grasp for pretzels given its time and weight reached a velocity of .0980665 meter per second in its fall.

That may not sound like much, and science requires replicating results which is something at least one of us is unwilling to do, but I will humbly proffer that a 1 lb. 12 oz. can of whole tomatoes falling from a height of three feet onto a lovely bare foot at .0980665 meters per second is sufficient to elicit a string of profanity that will stagger even the most calloused fifteen year old as his nine year old brother runs for his Minecraft blanket.

I’m not a calloused nine- or fifteen-year-old boy. I’m a calloused forty-eight-year-old fool. So my thought was obvious. Did the offending can of delicious whole tomatoes just careen or career?

There is a distinction. Something careens out of control and something careers with purpose. The can did fall toward a destination it had no indication existed because it was a can, so it had no idea. That would point to careening. But…

Careering means rushing forward. Isaac Newton as later amended by Albert Einstein might make the semantic point that in the second or millisecond drop from the three-foot shelf it was determined and careering. The English language is awesome.

Either way, a careening/careering can of a semi-vegetable on a kamikaze route to your foot should give you ample excuse to put a massively minor hold on you career and scream Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday because you are careening as you grab your poor foot. Your poor, needs-to-be-examined foot.

A simple can to the foot is easy to fake and it could be bad. I think the word is tarsals? Small bones and easily broken. Easily bruised as well.

It’s an amazing thought that a $1.69 can of Chef Boyardee ravioli falsely deployed is all that stands between you and a glorious weekend beginning with happy hour flatbread that’s got too much balsamic on it or a few hot wings or something involving bacon and potato skins. Bring a can to the office and pretend it fell mid hallucis longus. You should probably curse a lot at the moment of the “incident” and pretend to be ashamed about your language later. Do this in an obvious and central area. Now you are off for your “x-ray.”

I don’t like this week’s poem.

Emily Wilson’s Odysseus translated some Homeric bard’s description of a sunrise as “rosy fingered dawn.” She’s not alone. Someone named Sherer translated it the same way and there are “dawn of the rosy fingers” and “the rose dawn” or “dawn with her roses” in the genre, and Hyperion knows how many other variations there are beyond that because Homer’s copyright likely phased out by the end of the first and more impressive Roosevelt administration.

I can’t stand any variation of that translation.

Just write “Sunrise!” That’s so concise and relatable. Whatever the verse version of the word prosaic is – and it probably rhymes and so ends in “aic” – is a representation of a repressible urge. There’s no need for rosy fingers. There’s the sun. It’s coming up. The wise author keeps it simple.

Today we have Thomas Gray. He’s technically wonderful, but it’s rosy fingered dawns after rosy fingered dawns after rosy fingered dawns to the point where even the most circumspect teenage girl is making too much noise in the movie theater.

In my opinion instead of writing a poem Thomas Grey attempting to write poetically. It doesn’t work.

On the Death of Richard West

Thomas Gray (1716 – 1771)

In vain to me the smiling Mornings shine,

And reddening Phœbus lifts his golden fire;

The birds in vain their amorous descant join;

Or cheerful fields resume their green attire;

These ears, alas! for other notes repine,

A different object do these eyes require;

My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;

And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.

Yet Morning smiles the busy race to cheer,

And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;

The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;

To warm their little loves the birds complain;

I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,

And weep the more because I weep in vain.