Some Semi- Classical Verses

First Flight
When Icarus was a little boy
His dad made him many things,
And one day Daedalus gave him
A cunning pair of wings.

They were made of wood, wire, and wax,
And feathers of high grade,
Attached to little harnesses
That cupped each shoulder blade.

Around the workshop Icarus
Would run and flap and rise.
He nagged his father to take him on
Adventures in the skies.

His daddy said, "When we take flight,
Stay well within my shade."
But Icarus was a headstrong boy
And--you guessed it--disobeyed.

No sooner had they left the ground
When the boy went on his own.
His father screamed an angry warning
In a stern, commanding tone:

"Come back, my boy, beware the sun!
Beware its burning force!"
But Icarus, that stubborn boy, kept on
His disobedient course.

Up and upward the young boy soared,
Ever and ever higher,
Flying firmly towards the sun,
That ball of bright hot fire.

You know the rest--the melting wax,
The feathers breaking free--
The headlong hurtling plunge to death
In some Hellenic sea.

Can I make a moral from that flight
And the boy who flew it?
Ah, no, alas, once more I find
Wystan Auden beat me to it.

Corruptio Optimi...
Though classically educated
My mind is gutter-class:
For example I often wonder whom
Midas hired to wipe his ass.

Morality Tale
Her mother had warned her often
In no uncertain words:
Leda, my darling daughter,
Don't hang around with birds.

But Leda wouldn't listen.
She kept acting like a goose
Which led to her attracting
The wandering eye of Zeus.

The rest you know is history--
A theme to build poems upon.
Remember Leda, ladies,
When next you meet a swan.

Kakotechnikon
History is filled with men who have failed
And go unremembered now:
Think of the architect who gave the Greeks
Plans for a Trojan Cow.

Virgilian Advice
The Greeks withdrew.
They left a Horse.
The Trojans laughed
(Out loud, of course).

"We've won the War!"
They danced and sang,
Not hearing Gre-
Cian armor clang.

They slept that night,
Their revels through.
The Greeks emerged.
They slew and slew.

What lesson to take
From gifting Greeks?
Pay close attention
When Cassandra speaks.

Translated from the Attic

"Greek statues...are a reproach to common humanity.
They seem to have no sympathy with us, and not to
want our admiration."
__William Hazlitt on the Elgin Marbles

Do you think they suppose we really like
Standing around day after dreary day
In these cold and drafty museum halls
While crowds of hoi polloi walk slowly by
Pretending not to be taking sidelong looks
At our tits and pricks and our marbly balls?

Do you think they suppose we really like
Having always to be the sly target
Of ten thousand probing, prurient eyes
While pornophilic minds behind them,
Despite all their aesthetic homilies,
Are making technical notes about our size?

These monotheistic barbarian
Repressed northern and neurotic
Fog-begotten sons of frigid English bitches,
Do you think they suppose we really like
Hanging about in the altogether
With never a hint of bras nor breeches?

O. if only a god would come and break
This classical spell of ours, how swiftly
Back to sunny Greece they'd see us rise and fly,
Flashing them selenically one final
Fleeting glimpse of the perfectly dimpled
Demi-globes of our glistening glutei!

Some Politics as Usual

Quadrennial
--First Monday in November
The campaign is ending. The candidates
Make their last hawings and hemmings,
Each pleading with the electorate
To let him lead the lemmings.

The Old Formalist Attends a Convention
I hear the oratory smoothly rolling out
In clear consonants and open vowels,
Yet all that my mind seems to think about
Is the product of bovine bowels.

Representative Government
Congressmen come to Washington
Determined to do the public good.
Each styles himself as a veritable
Model of a modern Robin Hood.

Their terms ended, do they hurry home
To pursue a healthy hobby?
Ah, no. They stay and take a job with
The Sheriff of Nottingham's lobby.

American Politics
The cleaner of statues in Philadelphia's parks
In a yellow slicker and stiff gum boots
Hauls her hose and buckets up a ladder
To the bronze tricorn of George Washington
Or the brazen bald head of Ben Franklin
And sprays and sponges away the evidence
That transient birds have whitely left behind
Of their having naturally passed in passing.
She then applies carefully a waxen overlay
To make easier all her future cleansings.
Ah, the glory of a glorious public life
Led among the most famous of public men
Is no defense against one's image being
Defecated upon again and again and again.

More Historical Stuff

American Histories
Out of the glee of a lately entered war
With songs of Yankee Doodle Dandying
Over There, after kicking Kaiser Bill's
Heinie ass, came the growth of Wall
Street, speakeasies, and Stutz Bearcats--
So it was in the time of my father's youth.

Out of the hunger of long breadlines
Where railroad builders beside piles of apples
Bub-bubbed in Bing's voice, "Brother,
Can You Spare a Dime?" came news across
The seas, blitzkrieg, and the Willys Jeep--
So it was in the time of my brother's youth.

Out of the sleep of Eisenhower, the sass
Of Kennedy, and the movement of those
We politely called Negroes, into the Dulles-
Cold swamp of an Asian civil war came
Hippies, rock and roll, and the VW Beetle--
So it was in the time of my own green youth.

How History Happens
Out of the sight of his absent cavalier Stuart,
Lee accepts reluctantly the word of a civilian spy
Whom Longstreet had had the sense to employ
To learn just where the Federal forces lay,
That dragon he had marched north to distract
From its besieging of his Virginia castle.

Outside Chambersburg in a thinned-out stand of elms,
Searching the map for a place of converging roads
Where he might convoke the columns of his troops,
Lee's finger hovers, hovers, falls, and he says, "Here."
Meanwhile, southward, silver in his purse, a survivor
Whistles, crossing a river on a wrecked railroad trestle.

At City Point, Virginia
They are watching me,
And I am watching them
Watching me.

I leave my tent. They watch me.
I piss against a tree. They watch me.
I light a good cigar. They watch me.

Someone has set them, I suppose,
To watching me, these bright young officers
This camp is, all of a sudden, filled with.

I wonder, when their watching day is done,
Where do their grammatically correct reports go?

To Secretary Seward? Very likely.
To President Lincoln? I doubt it.

Someone north of here, in the District,
I'm sure, has read my record,
And decided, given the givens,
We must keep a close eye on him.

I think they are primed to catch me with my lips
Kissing the mouth of a bottle of Old Crow.

I disappoint them, drinking water only.
I disappoint myself, drinking water only.

I wish crazy Bill Sherman were here,
But no--he's out storming the Carolinas,
The redheaded lucky son of a bitch.

Upriver, Old Marse Robert Lee
Has him a tent--no, a house--
A fine snug brick one in the heart of downtown
Richmond, tended to by old family retainers.

Is there anyone, I wonder,
This hour, watching him?

Has Mr. Davis detailed
Some bright young men
From The Citadel or V.M.I.
To keep watch on him.

I think not.

Besides, what could they report?
He's out back feeding apples to Traveller?
He's at his Bible again?

Well, whether or not anyone else is,
I'm watching him.

And if that pious bastard so much as sets
One polished knee-high foxhunter's boot
Outside the city, I'll be on him--

On him and on his whole damned
Army of Northern Virginia
Like a blood-hungry tick dropping down
On the back of a scrawny coon hound.

And all these watchers here, watching me?

They can take their watching and all their
Written-by-the-rules-they-learned-at-Harvard
Reports and stuff them up
Their rosy-red Republican rear ends.

Go ahead, Bobby Lee, go ahead.
Make your goddamned move. I'm watching.
Oh, you can bet your aristocratic ass,
I'm watching.

With my fly buttoned crooked,
With my good cigar gone out,
And thirsty as a country-ham-fed dog--
I'm watching.

Two From The Sixties
I. Vietnam
Somewhere this night
Outside a palmed
And plastic camper's park
On the edge of a Florida swamp
An insanely happy
Suburban cat
Is stalking a heron
On an alligator's back.

II Bedtime Story
Once upon a time
Three little bears
(Who were probably brown)
Had a little white girl
Bussed in on them
From across the town.

The World Turned Upside Down
Just where and when I first learned of Vietnam, I know:
At a Labor Day barbecue in the crowded backyard
Of an end rowhouse in Northeast Philadelphia,
While the sun was sliding down behind all the unknown world
West of the Schuylkill River--there and then a young woman
Whose name, face, and body I have long since forgotten,
By way of making small talk, as people will, meeting
A stranger at a party, pointed down the street with a gesture
Of her beer bottle and said, "See that house, the third one there?"

My memory now is that I had just taken a bite
Of a hot dog and could only nod that Yes indeed I saw,
And stayed speechless for other reasons when I heard her say,
"Their youngest boy was killed in Vietnam last week."
She moved the bottle's neck in a small lateral arc
And stopped, lining up a house on the cross street, saying,
"Like their oldest was last month. I went to grade school with him
At St. Matt's on the Boulevard. And over there--" the bottle moved
To yet another house--"their son, the Marine?
He's at the Naval Hospital on Broad Street without his legs."

Now, more than ten thousand days to the day, I have forgotten much,
But never my stunned first awareness of a war being waged almost
Surreptitiously, unknown to all but some in some houses
A pretty girl could indicate with not even half a body's turn.
Only years later--after more holidays, more hot dogs,
More failures to see the pointings-out of pretty girls--
Would that semi-secret war become too public not to be brought
To its squalid end, until at last we left, as the British abandoned
Once our own rebellious land with drumroll and fife-squeal,
Drowning out the sobs of Hessian mothers for their sold-out sons.

November 11, 1989
Seventy years and one since
The soldiers of my father's war
Crouched in their clay trenches
And kicked French rats away.
This night in a transatlantic pub
I heard a bunch of slightly
Drunk people gathered around
An ill-tuned piano singing
The songs of that campaign,
And thought how soon, how soon
The lot of us in this smoky room
Would be a long, long way
From Tipperary, over there, over there,
Unremembered to Herald Square.

9/11/01
Never again snow
Falling ash against the sky
Between those towers.

The Old Drum Beaten Again
--October 2002
I heard on TV the other night
The second Bush declare
That it was time again for us
To clear Iraqi air.

The telecast brought back to mind
Sly Lyndon and Slick Dick
Who in my past on grainier sets
Had brandished TR's stick.

This barker, like all the others,
Will get what he desires,
Whipping up with fear and flags
High patriotic fires--

And young men in ignorance
Will march and not come back.
I took careful aim with my remote
And turned the screen to black.

Panta Rhei, March 2003
They have borne helmets and body armor before,
Those rivers, Tigris, Euphrates,
All the way back to those whose fear of The Afterlife
Was not of Hell, but Hades.

Those waters have passed all manner of passing empires
In History's ebb and flood,
And will flow on indifferent to this new influx,
This young American blood.

Home Front
Amid TV flicker and toys left everywhere
By their preschool children, they wait, soldiers' wives,
Withing the thin plasterboard walls of houses
On a base in the flat hot South Georgia sun
For the knock on the warped screen door
Of a chaplain with an officer in dress uniform,
Knowing their men now in a slow one-at-a-time war,
The huge assaults over, the carriers sailed home
To sunlit embraces on a San Diego pier.

Having heard white men in blue suits with red ties
Pronounce in Washington the objective achieved,
They wait in a deceptive American peace
Of Wal-Mart shopping, TV flicker and toys,
Toys left everywhere by their preschool children,
Sure that any one of them might yet be handed soon--
Under murmured words of a nation's gratitude
From the mouth of a gold-braided Honor Guardsman--
The soft three-cornered pillow of a folded American flag.

Some from History

In Yorba Linda
As they buried Richard Nixon's body
With a televised farewell wave,
I recalled Byron's urging pilgrims
To piss on Castlereagh's grave.

Syzygy, July, 1969
On the day his brother-sent rocket reached
The back of the moon's beyond
Ted Kennedy's Olds was being pulled
From a Chappaquidick pond.

In Retrospect
Looking back there can be
No ifs, ands, or buts:
Everyone in the 60's
Went a little nuts.

Old Blood and Guts
George Patton knew the simplicity of war:
Make the enemy the villain of the story.
Order your troops to make the other guy
Pro patria sui mori.

Agincourt
Never rained there down a deadlier shower
Out of the noonday sun
Than that of four hundred English archers
Letting loose and all as one.

Some Verses, Mostly Literary

An Ordinary Evening in Old Amherst
Upstairs Emily was writing down another
Of her arguments with God;
Downstairs in the darkness of the dining room
Austin was servicing Mrs. Todd.

During all this activity, one wonders,
What was dear Lavinia doing?
Oh, she stayed in the kitchen with Maggie the maid
And stirred up what was stewing.


A Postcard from Wessex
Touring Stinsford church's graveyard
We saw an old man there
Gesticulating gently
And talking to thin air.

"And who is that?" a stranger
Walking with us said.
The guide replied, "That's Mr. Hardy,
Out speaking with his dead."

"And has he done so always?"
Asked the stranger through his nose.
"Ah no sir, no sir. Only since
He gave up writing prose."


Portrait d'Artiste
James Joyce, ever continental,
To the end of his days
Pronounced his novel's title as
Oo-liss-ayze.


Overshadowed
Pity poor Conrad Aiken who
Felt second-class to the end,
Knowing he'd be remembered
Mostly as Eliot's friend.


Palinodes
"...even if poets can't think, their poems do."
--Howard Nemerov
Why, yes, Howard, so mine do,
Bless their wizened little souls,
But what they usually think is
They'd rather have been Lowell's.


A Pact in Concord
--On learning that the land on which
Thoreau built his cabin was owned by
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Waldo, you have my sacred word
As my most solemn bond
That I will not foul the land you own
Out there by Walden Pond.

Henry, get on out to the woods
If you truly, truly must.
I can think of no other man to whom
I'd lief let my land in trust.


Psong of the Chattahoochee
--After going over the side while rafting
It is a thing of liquid beauty--
Enough to give
Any poetic soul
A Wordsworthian shiver--

To know that one has peed
In what one learned
In the Fourth Grade
Was Sidney Lanier's river.


The Poet as Dedicated Father
"Holly, " he called loudly upstairs,
"It's I, votre cher Papa,
Returned from my trip to Gotham,
Come back with your training bra."


St. Louis Blues
Surely one dull Missouri morning
Mrs. Charlotte Eliot, feeling herself in exile
And desiring for her infant son
Her own never-achieved poetic laurels
Must have pushed him in a pram
To the Mississippi's banks and said,
"Observe, Thomas: this is not the Charles."

Even then his preternaturally hyper-
Refined mind must have been capable
Of making sharp critical distinctions,
Full of ums and ers and cautious ahems,
As he thought, "Correct, Mother.
It is not. Nor is it the Styx,
The Acheron, nor even the Thames."


Some Poets Die Too Young
What epics might Hopkins
With his shipwreck mania
Have made of the Titanic
And the Lusitania.

More Quatrains

Via Negativa
Think of a ladder.
Think of a net.
Mostly nothing,
But something yet.


The Young Bad Poet Just Misses
He sincerely fakes within his poems
Simulated grief and joy,
Successfully writing a sort of
Artificial Real McCoy.


You, Surgeon General
Cigarettes are truly hazardous to one's health.
There's no denying they have a lethal power:
Have you ever tried to retrieve a lit one
From your lap at sixty miles per hour?


Declension
Life goes down from good to worse
Year after passing year:
At birth, a rich and silken purse,
At death, a plain sow's ear.


The Day Before Payday
In my wallet's
Thin partitions
Too few pictured
Politicians.


Xanthippic
Those who, like Socrates,
Have virago wives,
Are wise--like him--to lead
Philosophic lives.


Gettysburg
Glory is selective.
It lands on few.
To the left of Pickett
Marched Pettigrew.


Quest
When I was young I went in search
Of the holiest Holy Grail.
Now I'd be happy just to find
Fewer bills among my mail.


At Sea
Young, you think life is a cruise,
One pleasant vacation trip.
Old, you learn it's a long hard voyage
On a Herman Melville ship.


Yes, Prufrock
I, too, have heard the mermaids singing
Out beyond the tidal line,
But the song I heard them singing was
"My Darling Clementine."

Change
Overwhelmed by the cellular tsunami
Even the open wall-mounted pay phones
Are headed for the black oblivion
Of those boxes with a collapsing door
Into which Clark Kent ducked many years before.

Where now, in this new world, will children find
Smooth cool coin slots to put their fingers in,
Always with a hesitant tremor of hope
That maybe, just maybe this magic time
They'll touch the silver of an unclaimed dime?

Gypsy Woman
They told me she was a mind reader.
I thought, "Let's see if that's true,"
So when I was introduced to her
I said, "Charmed. How do I do?"

She gave me a smile like a shark's
In an aquarium's glass tank.
"I can't tell a single thing," she said.
"Your mind's so empty, it's a blank."

Novel Thought
Imagination can create anything at all
Within a mortal's head:
High in the Berkshire Mountains
Moby Dick was born and bred.

A Minor Minor Poet
My work is a matter of the miniscule.
I write not of Mortal, but of Venial Sin,
Like those old sideshow men who inscribed
The Pater Noster on the head of a pin.

The Nomad in Old Age
The caravan passes me by.
It is oasis bound.
All day I hear the camel bells
Ring with a fainter sound.

Making the Best
One brings what one can
To Life's long struggle:
A man with just one hand
Must somehow learn to juggle.

Gentleman Farmer
I have purchased an old henhouse,
Furnished with weak locks.
I have hired a security guard.
His name is Mr. Fox.

Amphibological
Duplicity lies
In my body's sac:
I am--like you--
Diplocardiac.

Foresight
Aldous Huxley displayed once and for all
The professional writer's mind:
He began to practice typing in the dark
When told he was going blind.

Footnote to the Proverb
Walk a mile in the other man's shoes
To get an empathetic fix:
But do not try this if your size is ten
And his is only six.

Anatomy Lesson
Among your body's mostly
Symmetrical bilateral parts
The greatest irregularity
Is, of course, your heart's.

Incandescence
Did Thomas Edison in his wildest
Imagination's flight
Ever dream of baseball games
Being played at night?