Death

Anne Carson has a new poem in the August 16 & 23 New Yorker, "The 'Ode to Man' From Sophocles' Antigone." I read it yesterday in the context of Hölderlin's poem "Im Walde" in which he contrasts the noble wild beast in the forest with human kind, blessed and cursed with language, "most dangerous of possessions."

Carson writes of "man" that he protects himself and controls the world with his fabrications, with language, dooming "animals and mountains technically." Still,

"Death he cannot doom.

Fabrications notwithstanding.

Evil,

good,

laws,

gods,

honest oath taking notwithstanding."

Beside these thoughts, I place pictures of the remains of the cat's recent meal and of the incipient wasps I doomed when I pried the beautiful mud nest off the garage wall.