Pyramids of Giza: illustration in Egypt & Nubia / from drawings made on the spot by David Roberts ... ; lithographed by Louis Haghe. London, 1846-1849 (Library of Congress)
At night an Arabian in my room,
With his damned hoobla-hoobla-how,
Inscribes a primitive astronomy
Across the unscrawled fores the future casts
And throws his stars around the floor.
-- Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
With his damned hoobla-hoobla-how,
Inscribes a primitive astronomy
Across the unscrawled fores the future casts
And throws his stars around the floor.
-- Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
Odd dreams, after a lunch drowned in balsamic vinegar,
Trapped between his paunch and his retirement,
The executive poet, heavy in his Hartford hacienda,
Envisions -- while the constellations pour
Their intense lumens into his room with the familiar
Wild profligacy, almost as though
He had done something once to deserve them --
An Arabian in that endarkened Connecticut
Chamber, inscribing with his damned
Hoobla-hoobla-how a primitive
Astronomy from the unscrawled
Fores cast by a ruined augury
And throwing his stars around the floor
Like the marbles of a child who has too many toys
To count: the light-flood, supremely fictive
Night-spill of images beyond calculation,
The slide from star to pyramid to tomb
In the first valley of the actuarial kings
Already taking him, the emperor, with his
Damned ice cream wagon empire, down
And down -- down and down and down.
Trapped between his paunch and his retirement,
The executive poet, heavy in his Hartford hacienda,
Envisions -- while the constellations pour
Their intense lumens into his room with the familiar
Wild profligacy, almost as though
He had done something once to deserve them --
An Arabian in that endarkened Connecticut
Chamber, inscribing with his damned
Hoobla-hoobla-how a primitive
Astronomy from the unscrawled
Fores cast by a ruined augury
And throwing his stars around the floor
Like the marbles of a child who has too many toys
To count: the light-flood, supremely fictive
Night-spill of images beyond calculation,
The slide from star to pyramid to tomb
In the first valley of the actuarial kings
Already taking him, the emperor, with his
Damned ice cream wagon empire, down
And down -- down and down and down.
Graf Zeppelin over Great Pyramid of Giza: stereoscopic view by Keystone View Company, 1931 (Library of Congress)