Wallace Stevens On Buttocks

I’ve agreed to write something about Wallace Stevens for Ms. Baroque’s blog this week, while she takes time away to have her internal organs recalibrated and tuned to racing perfection. It’s why I was working late last night and fell asleep across my keyboard.

I woke up this morning with a stiff neck and it only got worse when I walked into the kitchen and Gabby slapped me.

‘What’s that for?’ I cried, rubbing my jaw.

She slapped me again. ‘You filth!’ she said and made to hit me again.

‘Whatever is the matter, woman?’ I asked, pinning her arms back before they could unleash any more Romanian fury.

‘That,’ she said, using her nose to point to my forehead. ‘How could you be so rude?’

A quick glance into the silvered side of the egg & muffin toaster revealed that the letters ‘RTYU’ were pressed into my forehead. I didn’t understand what had happened until I figured out that Gabby was seeing it in reverse and that in the Romanian alphabet (which, as you know, is much like ours only backwards), those four letters make up the filthiest word imaginable.

Well, I explained about my falling asleep jaw to spacebar and apologies were soon as plentiful as the orange juice and Alpen. I settled down and read the papers, contemplating Bryan’s excellent article on the nature of good and evil and the chances of peace in a world in which Romanians go to war with the mistaken belief that progress can come by smacking the filthy words from off a tired man’s brow.

It hasn’t been the start to the day I’d wished for.

The only good thing to come of it was that Big Frank rang me to say that all the tinkering with the site is done. I gave him my hearty thanks and asked him about his views on the narrative of ends and the moral quandaries of modern warfare but, to be honest, I think the trouble with my buttocks has been enough for the poor man. He mumbled something about fingers and pies and hung up pretty quickly.

I can’t complain. The site look particularly fine this morning and I think my buttocks look like all buttocks should, which, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is ‘up-rising and down-falling, bares / The last largeness, bold to see’.