Image via WikiCommons user Stewart Butterfield
Last December I was playing golf at Patriot’s Point, across the Cooper River from Charleston, SC, a course thronged with many sorts of wading birds and compelling views of Ft. Sumter and Charleston’s outer harbor where, as Charlestonians like to say, the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers come together to form the Atlantic Ocean. A little green heron of the type that is known in some places as a “Fly-up-the-creek” or “Shitepoke” flew across the fairway some fifty yards in front of me, spraying sheets of excrement. The sight brought to my mind a fragment of verse: “let their liquid siftings fall.” I immediately addressed my mental energy to getting the context of the quotation right, a distraction sadly not helpful to my golf game. The context turned out—as is so often the case with remembered crumbs of verse, in my experience—to be wholly inappropriate to the setting, a warm winter afternoon with high cumulus clouds and lots of benign bird song.
“The nightingales,” I recalled, “are singing near the Convent of the Sacred Heart,/ And sang within the [something] wood/ When Agamemnon cried aloud/ And let their liquid siftings fall/ To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.” Instead of reacting to the striking dissimilarity between my idyllic situation and T. S. Eliot’s allusion to Agamemnon’s sudden death at the instigation of his wife, I was distracted because I couldn’t put a word in the place of [something]. Why couldn’t I
