A Valentine For Matthew Arnold

William Logan (1977)

The Seas of Faith are full again with vain
Philosophies, empty orders of gods,
Demons of the mind and heart supplanting
The slow angers of love with hollow stares
And rhetoric. These are not days to love,
When the rare expectations of morning
Will be blackened by the shoddy evening.
Let us be faithless to one another.
The monarch butterflies now copulate
In the kitchen, bats bare their teeth against
The screens, and throatless songbirds rasp all night.
At dawn, armies of toads and frogs litter
The walks. All animals act cruelly
Toward each other. We are no different.

Geckos In Obscure Light

William Logan (2007)

Tentative, greedy, by night they came,
drawn to the insects drawn to the light.

Their shadow organs pulsed
beneath bellies distended as Falstaff's,

backs a tarnished armor studded
with the rosettes of some obscure disease.

What of their victims, the cannon fodder,
Welsh soldiery thrown each night

against the muzzle flare? Ragged, high-strung moths,
green lacewings streamlined like F-16s—

the geckos, like great officers and kings,
took them into their mouths, more or less

at leisure, with a gratifying snap.
Silently, of course, through the pane of glass,

where death comes only on a smaller scale.