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?