Possible Beginning

Here is the proposed first paragraph for my creative essay project, tentatively titled “Irony: the Cookbook”

The Argentinean satirist Emilio Valverde, whose The Care and Maintenance of Wives remains a classic of misogynist literature (a genre whose admirers are few but whose followers are legion), once said, “it is the nature of women to vacillate indefinitely between beauty and honesty.”  The phrase better applies to writers, especially when they are willing to invent an Argentinean chauvinist in order to secure a first sentence.  Writers are scoundrels, as my mother could say after finding herself in this essay’s first draft, and as the real Emilio Valverde (a Dominican race-car driver) will discover, when he finds this essay—as I found him—by googling his own name.  To write is to lie. Therefore I must contend (for my very survival) that irony consists in telling lies so blatant that they magically transform into the truth.  This essay is about irony.  Thus the lie.  Thus also the doubling back upon the lie.

Ed. Note: Yes it will all be like this.

Note to the Ed: p*** off.

Kafka Never Wrote a Thing

He twisted a ring out of rye grass

And bedded her down

Where the willow roots made them a bower of sorts.

If he’d known, if he’d known, if he’d known,

She’d be gone by December,

He would have changed nothing

Except the weather.

The weather had been unremarkable.

Concerning the delicate undertones of her breasts

He felt no need to say a word

So he left those stories to themselves

And never felt the wild delight of dying thirst

Drawing pages from his throat.

And no one prophesied the end

But he was happy for a moth-wing’s space

And so am I, to think him so.

But the tiger growls softly:

Perhaps the world’s fearful symmetry demands

That some must believe sex is death

So others may believe that death is union.

How else to see past flesh?

And what else is there,

But to hope that even K.

Could greet the bitter angels with a grin.

A death’s head mask perhaps

But even so.

Why This is Particular?

Here most songs have a purpose.

The song for the trimming of hedges you’ve already heard,

And the one for the pulling of lawn-mower cords.

You may have heard this song sung over flat bicycle tires;

It is also for cleaning the dishes.

That one on the lips of the man with the battered hat

Comes to those nursing a family grudge,

But don’t hold that against him.

This song is only for times when the cigarette smoke

Curls itself into a question mark

Over the head of the woman you love

—or might have loved—for her sorrow only.

Of course each must instantly cease

When the occasion passes

And some are never sung twice by anyone.

But then there are songs that come to the tongue

Unbidden and purposeless.

Silent ships from foreign ports of call,

Wings that beat in the dark

And are gone before the match flares.

These songs, say the ancients,

Who sit in their circles of stone

Each with one leg propped behind their heads,

Are the greatest of all.

Significant as the ways women have

With the bodies of men.

Beautiful and senseless and vanishing.