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.