Too often to feel like Angelo in Shakespeare’s problem play, to whom Isabella appeals, and rails about proud man dressed in little briefs, or rather “little brief authority.” Our glassy essence is the problem. It plays fantastic tricks. Soon enough all the angels turn to crybabies. They laugh themselves beneath themselves: less celestial, more splenetic. Then there’s Lakers small forward Ron Artest, boarding the team bus in his underwear, Looney Tunes theme playing in the soundtrack in his head. “Unique,” once said a teammate. Chagrin-maker, odd duck, he’s prone to improbable shots, courtside fist fights. Is a goat in the outhouse (his own words). “He has a penchant for little things tripping him up in the process,” his coach says of Artest, a product of the Queensbridge projects. Human penchant, that is, “so he is kind of dogged by his own nature.” Finally, Berryman’s poet at eighty, in Eleven Addresses to the Lord: “don’t try to reconcile anything … this is a damned strange world.” Nonetheless a world, according to dear Berryman, hearing nothing in “Thy kingdom come,” nonetheless a world still capable of awaiting His prepared astonishments.
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