And the grand prize goes to anyone who
knows who Gerolamo Cardano is.
It's not that I'm so smart, just my wife
keeps feeding me these names and I go to the library
and look them up.
Gerolamo Cardano was a Renaissance mathematician
and astronomer, all around Renaissance man.
And if you go over to the library
and check his biography, even in an encyclopedia
you'll find it fascinating.
And one of the most fascinating things about him
was because of his interest in statistics,
he calculated the day that he would die,
and then when that day came he committed suicide out of fear.
I don't know why you're laughing at someone else's misfortune,
but the problem when it comes to a poem
was of course, that was the sort of thing a poet would go for,
which is a reason why I don't mention that in this poem,
because it seems to me too obvious and too easy,
too dramatic.
So I wrote the poem, it touches on a variety of things
in his own life and on things in Western civilization.
It begins with a short Latin phrase, Ubi panis ibi
patria, who knows what that is?
There's another book.
Ubi-- you're all so modest.
I had to look it up too, it means roughly translated,
where the bread is that's where your country is.
"Gerolamo Cardano"
Ubi panis ibi patria, sing the emigrants through their noses.
God's calliopes as they cross the sea,
so sparkling it might grow wheat.
They're not looking for virtue but a place
to bury the riches they carry with them.
To what land?
Perhaps it makes little difference,
except in the peasant dress their flirting daughters
will wear, their sons in their romantic sweat.
As for them, as allogamous as bankers
who support the local opera and watching the show,
wishing they were thieves, participate in it,
any land will do.
They calculate and calculate.
Wherever they go they stay home, afraid of this:
the day the Catholic sky grows gravity and breaks open
like a wheat sack to affirm their calculation.
However you cut it, in palaces or log cabins,
government is the badge of lost paradise.
And wise from that, in between the gamble and philosophize
in Italian at the edges of their lives,
wild buckaroos having the bad boys' good time.
Supposed to be hilariously funny, but anyway.