On this day, a dreary wintry Saturday afternoon 202 years ago, a banker named Horace Smith travels roughly 30 miles on the Tyburn Turnpike from London to visit his friend in the lacemaking town of Marlow. His friend is Percy Shelley. According to Guy Davenport, a Professor at the University of Kentucky, "Shelley was a mere boy to judge from his snub nose, spindly six-feet, and wild hair which he ducks in a pail of water from time to time for as he says the freshness of it. His wife, Mary, a wild-eyed young redhead, reads Tacitus for hours. Her novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, is at the printer’s." The three talk history. Specifically, the pharaohs, and the grandest pharaoh of them all, Rameses II, who had a 57-foot statue of himself erected at Thebes inscribed with his name User-ma-Ra which the Greek historian Hekataios made a hash of, changing it to Ozymandias. The full inscription read King of Kings User-ma-Ra am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let them outdo my deeds. Smith and Shelley decide to have some fun and write sonnets about the toppled monument which is all that remains of Rameses II’s greatness. Smith titles his On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below. Shelley calls his Ozymandias. In 10 minutes flat, or thereabouts, he composed one of the greatest poems of all time.

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again

as my life is done in watermelon sugar.

          - Richard Brautigan

The iterations in needle towers lining the streets

trouble redundancy with their button-downess . . .

and lucrative curbs . . . You sought monasticism

and safety and time off . . . eschewing the chatter

of masked players mired in the foibles

of middle and end games . . . escorting regret

at a moment's notice . . . Shocking, yes? . . .

the mess of moves that arrived with the pizza . . .

a meals-on-wheels sort of gig . . .

about to hold forth when your bishop pinned my queen

in watermelon sugar . . . and that was that . . .

We could consult the tale of the tape, I suppose . . .

Queen's Gambit Anya Taylor-Joy

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Crossing bridges always brings you back

to those caffeinated moments of nocturnal visitors

quoting Keats in the middle of REM sleep . . .

at least I think it was Keats . . .

it sounded like Keats . . . maybe not . . .

This obsession with return . . .

with the craze to rework the jigsaw puzzle

as if the odd pieces on the floor

would hold the key . . . the answer . . .

would give you a moment of calm . . .

Odysseyites have kidnapped the remains of the day

the breakfast nook demanding a ransom

the hounds on the scent of gingerbread

closeted ghosts awaiting . . .

You are frenzied with happenstance . . .

the yellowing instructions from your past

highlight the insignificance of tread wear . . .

Can you imagine? . . .

This too . . . kept pealing to a minimum

during a time of splurge

while others in the cornfield insisted on shucking

as the morning after the morning after

begged the question . . .

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Was it that far from the mapwork . . .

the insistence to get on with the cancellations? . . .

A breadwinner's dream . . .

Retracing the redacted? . . .

The trail muted but discernable

and the search party hot on the tracks

adjusting to the slippage in terrain . . .

And if I'm not mistaken . . . in the entire

offset bailiwick

which seems to have fallen into our laps

with little fortitude to boot . . .

You have bent over backwards many times

as evidenced by the plethora

of doctoral dissertations

microscoping your rather large conundrum . . .

OK, I see no reason not to pull up stakes

and begin yet again at square one . . .

A bellwether year, perhaps? . . .

Have you forgotten the first time . . .

the singular devotion to the raucous

which if nothing else

fed the excitement that propelled you

notwithstanding into a variety of encounters? . . .

Ruven Afanador