<sup>Hyperbole
I keep high in my mind the cliff
That was my Everest when young
On whose face in boy-imagining
Between the earth and death I hung.

Whenever I return to where
Only funerals make me go,
I do not drive to where it stands
For fear it prove too low.

I fool my mind with my own past,
Exiled from childhood’s dreams,
Nor will I cease to swim across
The rivers I made of streams.</sup>


Locus Classicus
Think of the early humanists
Bent over in their privies
Reading the epics of Homer
Or some narrative of Livy’s.
 
Ignoring the cloacal smell
They preserved the classical mind
By letting their spirits soar above
That which they left behind.
 
Pity the students centuries down
Being force-fed Greek and Latin
Wishing the humanists had dropped
The texts in the place they sat in.


The Child is Father to the Man
“…’objective correlative’ which was,
I suppose was what they called a mask in St. Louis”                                                
                       --Seamus Heaney, “Feeling Into Words”
It was the afternoon of All Hallows’ Eve,
And Mrs. Eliot was supervising
Her six-year old son’s selection
Of the costume he would wear that night.
 
To her suggestions of pirate, hobo, or cowboy
He said with a stamp of his foot. “None
Is objectively correlative, Mother,
And thus none is exactly right.”



<sup>The Shropshire Lad: 1969
Back in a rubber body bag
Blacker than his black skin
Came Calvin of the Corner Poolroom
 And coke and grass and gin.

What to Calvin was Viet Nam,
Poor child of the city’s brick,
Who did not hear the sniper’s bolt
As it slid back with a snick?

Over his head the gunship choppers
Chopped out their deadly chuck,
But Death ran Calvin to the ground
Outside of Phan Van Vuc.

They laid him down in Arlington,
Gave his mother a folded flag.
His poolroom brothers sneered and scoffed—
Called it a honky rag.

For what, I wonder, did this lad die?
 For what his early grave?
Poor Calvin. He did not even have
An English Queen to save.

I hope the chaplains are correct:
That undone is Adam’s Fall,
Since the sum of Calvin’s life seems now
 Only letters on The Wall.</sup>
 

 

Circular Education
Amazed at all the quick information
I now can gain from electronic media,
In my old age I remember the blue-backed
Volumes of my boyhood’s encyclopedia.
 
Each bought weekly for carefully saved pennies
Through a supermarket’s promotional scheme,
Those cheaply printed books were my source
For facts, surely, but also many a dream.
 
No Britannica with elegant onionskin pages
And certainly riddled with errors, in those
I was first taught that knowledge can be netted
And held in alphabetized cages of prose.
 
On shelves of pine my father assembled
They sat, badly illustrated, poorly bound,
Where I learned that the world, when questioned,
Has places in it where answers are found.
 
I know by now those books are papery dust
As I am soon no doubt destined to be.
Still, I share yet their futile ambition:
To categorize the truth from A to Z.


Addicted
I open a box marked Winston
And extract a tube of death—
Another one for shortening
My allotted store of breath.
 
It was an Englishman named Raleigh
Who brought tobacco back
And taught all the world the way
Of dying pack by pack.

I keep persisting like a fool,
Drawing smoke across my tongue,
Ignoring what is happening--
The blackening of each lung.
 
I know one day that I will quit
This habit and this sin:
The day my body’s finally done
With pulling air within.


Co-Evolution
On his way up to civilization
Homo sapiens guessed that dogs and cats
Might be useful in keeping his stored-up grain
Relatively clear of mice and rats.
 
The dogs and cats on their own way
To civilization shrewdly had a hunch
That this semi-hairless sap on two legs
Could be the source of a free and endless lunch.


Dick Corey
He did what?  Shot himself?
Put a bullet through his head?
You’re serious? Certain about that?
Jee-zuss! Dick Corey dead!

Sure, I knew him. Went to Harvard
With him, Class of Oh-Three.
Oh, shit. Maybe he found out
About his wife and me.


Fashion Statement
Did Lazarus, one of the world’s
Few resurrected men,
Have a wife who went into widowhood
And came right out again?
 
And did she turn and rail at him,
“What the hell are you doing back--
I’ve come to like having people say
How good I look in black.”?

 

 

 

Indoctrinated
Parochially schooled
I learned to read
And write and spell
 
But also the Four Last
Things: Death, Judgment,
Heaven, and Hell.
 
The further on in life
I go the less
I am surprised.
 
Strangely the world makes sense
For those who’ve been
Well-catechized.


My Fellow Pennsylvanian Upriver
Reading a few Wallace Stevens poems
A sense of warm admiration upwelled:
The only poet in the American Canon
Who knew how Schuylkill is spelled.
 
But then I thought of Williams and Pound,
Undergrads together at Penn.
Surely they both had crossed that river
Going downtown now and again.

Yet neither ever published that magic word
In verse whether formal or free,
And so I keep in my heart a spot for him
Who spelled Schuylkill right for me.


Short to Second to First
Joe Tinker just shook his head and muttered.
Johnny Evers stayed, as usual, mum.
Frank Chance, though, kicked dirt and angrily cursed.
 “What a lousy asswipe bunch of pitchers!
Every friggin’ time I turn and look around,
I see a goddamned runner on at first.”
 
Meanwhile Harry Steinfeldt over at third
Whose name was never in a verse before
Put his glove to mouth and covered a yawn.
 Harry, a journeyman, knowing his place,
Did just what the Cubbies paid him to do:
Chewing tobacco, he looked calmly on.


The Old Formalist
Gives Advice
To a Young Apprentice
Write and do not worry
If what you’re making
Merits the name of art.
 
The man who is truly deaf
Does not hear at all
His own body’s fart.

 
Thought on One End of a Leash
On a Cold Rainy Night
I’ve learned that in America cats as pets
Outnumber dogs by three to one.
I think that this disparity has arisen because
Walking a dog is no goddamned fun.


Trophy Wives
Sleek long-leggèd women pass me —and I sigh—
Walking with men far wealthier than I.
Wealthier, really? How do you know?
It is with the really rich only such women go

Chasing the Long Ball
We are all outfielders on the run
Across the green grass, looking back,
Hoping to hear our cleated feet
Crunch in time on the warning track.

At Walter Reed
When you list all those who profit
From war and war’s loud alarms
Be sure to include the providers
Of prosthetic legs and arms.

At Ford's Theater
Consider the poor cast:
Not one curtain call
The night that John Booth
Upstaged them all.

Climate Change
The adolescent male has scientific evidence
Of global warming:
The perfection of a push-up bra doing
Its global forming.

Coffee Spooner
One night I heard myself slurring
The veritas that is in vino,
So I tried to sober myself up
With a cap of cuppacino.

Freudian
There is always a hidden meaning
In the things that parents do.
They are teaching their babies death
When they play at peek-a-boo.

Lady Luck
I sat across the table from her,
My chin upon my fist.
She had a Rolex on her mind.
I had a Timex on my wrist.

Happy Accident
Think of the prehistoric potter
And her thumb’s inadvertent slip.
Thanks to her all of us following folk
Have pitchers with a pouring lip.

Mission
This is the destiny of Eve’s
Every last son or daughter:
To be sent out with a sieve
Commanded to gather water.

Political Advice
Stand neither to the left nor right.
Stay firmly in the middle.
Note how Rome is always burning.
Learn to play the fiddle. 

 

Furor Scribendi
I waste paper,
I waste ink,
Just to see just
What I think.


Insecticide
"Cleanliness was rudimentary; one of the highest
paid members of the hospital (Guy's) staff was
the bug-catcher."
        --John Keats, The Making of a Poet, Aileen Ward
'Ere's me bucket, Mr. Keats. See wot a good day I've 'ad:
Nineteen roaches, big around as yer thumb in size,
Forty beetles, an', Lord luv us, two hundred and ten
Of the very worst of all--them fuckin' pesky flies.


A Cold Dish
Ms. Ruth Lilly left a fortune
To a poetry magazine
In the hallowed pages of which
No verse of hers was ever seen.

Year after year from Chicago
To Indiana rejections came.
Still, Ms. Lilly wrote on and on
While lesser poets tasted fame.

Dejected, did she weep and wipe
Tears away with Kleenex tissue?
No. She cracked the whip of her will.
Now her name's in every issue.


The Old Formalist at a Picnic
Eating little, he drank a lot of warm wine.
It affected his speech, his use of words.
Eventually he saw in a nearby meadow
Nothing but hummingflies and butterbirds.


Six Characters in Search of an Author
Juliet and Romeo
In their balcony scene
Othello being jealous
Iago cunningly mean
Hamlet in his castle
Lear upon the heath--
Always William Shakespeare
Lurking underneath.


The Miracle of Paper
With it we can safely preserve
The thoughts of great minds,
And also, more importantly,
Cleanse our bare behinds.


Consciousness
A mystery that will always be
Forever and forever unknown:
How did mind arise in such a bag
Of meat, blood, gristle, and bone?


Sligo Verse
Not sure, they took some bones
And sank them in Sligo ground.
Auden put them in a poem,
Pleased with its rhyming sound.

For all we know the bones
Irish gravel and dirt cover
Are those of some French villager
Murdered by his wife's lover.

No matter. The poet said to lie
Under an admonishing stone
Had he been live and told of it
Would have made the tale his own.

To a Young Artist
Grab your hard hat.
Fill your lunch pail.
Heed what I say
And you won't be sorry.

Report for work.
Punch the time clock
At The Sisyphus
Company's quarry.


Pillow Talk: The Poets
Don't tell me that the early love
Of Ted and Sylvia wasn't wonky.
One of his nicknames for her was
Kish-Pish-Ponky.


Imminent Foreclosure
Young I chose to live in a tower.
Yes, of ivory was it made.
Old I learn there's a mortgage on it
And, yes, it must be paid.


Housebreaking
The great poet does a thing that only
Rarely can be done if ever in prose:
He weaves a rug that you yourself will stain
And then in it he rubs your nose.


Kodak Moment
When George Eastman thought to put
Imaging in the hands of Everyman
He could never have known

That one day that same Everyman
Could carry around in his pocket
A camera in a phone.


Eternal Question
Macrobius wrote it down
In lingua Latina:
Ovumne prius fuerit
Aut gallina?

Though a translation you may
Neither need nor beg,
Here it is: what came first,
The chicken or the egg?

On Having Been Astonished
How often in my life--
More times than can be tracked--
Has my gast been flabbered
And my gob been smacked.


Penmanship
Disdaining the privilege of carelessness
That my age has brought me
I keep aware of all the great and little truths
That the good Sisters once taught me,

So that even on grocery lists and the like--
Say, all my notebook jottings--
I am always painstaking about crossing t's
And punctilious with i-dottings.


National Geographic
Achievement of maturity in the male
Of the species can be truly measured:
It occurs when one, sufficiently sexed,
Ceases searching for color photographs
Of the female breast, calmly turns each page,
And begins to read the magazine's text.


On Critics
I learned as an infant
At Philadelphia's Victorian Zoo
That apes and humans
Are members of a kindred species.

As a child I was told
That the great gorilla Bamboo
Once tried to pelt me
With clumps of his own feces.


Natural Selection
Thinking a lot about genetics and Darwin
Has raised for me questions like these:
Did millions of mothering mice avoid mousetraps?
And did they breed babies indifferent to cheese?

Post Vatican II
They're all gone now.
They're lost in the past.
Fish on Fridays
And the Eucharistic Fast.


Honesty in Government
In 1985 they altered the title
To Poet Laureate
From Consultant in Poetry
To the Library of Congress.
Re-naming made no difference.
The same bad legislation resulted.

Congress made the change
Because after much research
It was learned that in all
The nearly fifty previous years
Not a single poet by a Member
Had even once ever been consulted.


Possibly the World's Shortest Te Deum
I said, "God forbid."
And He did.


Platonism
Consider the Unity of the Canine Condition,
All sharing a similar supposition,
From the greatest of Danes to the tniest pug:
The Idea of a Perfectly Unpissed-Upon Fire Plug.


On the Hymns
of Sunday Morning
Out of all churches
Called Christian
Steepled or storefront
Throughout America
With all of their
Squabbling
Contentious
Obstinate and
Contradictory
Theological views

I think God
Chooses to listen
Mostly to Southern
Black Baptist ones
Since God's wide
Creation, I've noted,
Is filled mainly
With two things.
One is Rhythm and
The other is Blues.

On Having a Fellow Poet to Send Stuff To
Think of Shakespeare, finishing a scene
And laying aside his pen,
Saying to himself, "That's one I'll have to
Make sure I show to Ben."


Punctuation
How great an invention is the comma,
The purpose of which is chiefly
To make us pause and think,
Even if ever so briefly.


As Time Goes By
The poor makers of clocks and watches
Are slowly losing their power.
More and more people are checking cellphones
To determine the hour.


At Walgreen's
Illness and injury are good for some in this world.
They are the source of profit for the healing trades.
Think of all the aspirin sold by Bayer
And Johnson & Johnson's bandaging aids.


The Old Formalist Needs Love, Too
Nightly I see TV commercials for services
Aimed at mixing, matching, and mating
And wonder why for the very, very old,
There isn't a site called Carbon Dating.


Curdled Thought
Many mornings I am reminded
Of the acidic state of my soul:
More than once I have unknowingly poured
Sour milk into my cereal bowl.

In the Locker Room
A thought came to me the other day
(As usual it was metered)--
More than one man is appalled
At the way that he's appetered.


Verba Sat Sap
Cliches are clichés because they are true.
There can be little doubt about that.
There is a barrel whose bottom we scrape
And a bag out of which we let the cat.

Anti-Theft
My father lived in a time when men wore hats.
In places like bars they hung with others on a rack.
Carefully in India ink on the inner band he'd printed
In neat upper case, "LIKE HELL IT'S YOURS PUT IT BACK."
His message truly worked, I cannot doubt it.
I never even once saw him come home without it.

Unclipped
I have a sure measure of time.
Unlike my watch, it never fails.
It is the accumulation of grime
Under the edges of my nails.

Oh, No
One's modern life is filled
With many a minor fright:
I looked down and saw
A lit CHECK ENGINE light.

Recent

Mahogany Row Conversation
Said Mr. Rolls to Mr. Royce,
"We are compelled to make
A critical marketing choice."

Said Mr. Royce to Mr. Rolls,
"We'll build limousines for the King
And the wealthiest of souls."

Said Mr. Rolls to Mr. Royce,
"A demographic extremely small.
You've not been thinking evidently."

Said Mr. Royce to Mr. Rolls,
"Oh, God damn it all to bloody hell--
Offer the less well-off the Bentley!"

St. Peter Speaks of Modern Physics
to Sir Isaac Newton
Ike, old boy, I've got some bad news.
I tried to keep it from you,
But I can no longer hide it.

You know that famous apple of yours?
Now they're going around and saying
There's gravity inside it.

Olfactory
Poets in the days that Miniver Cheevy dreamed about
Wrote often of the sweet odors that gardens embowered.
It is well for us to remember that the loves of those poets
And they themselves seldom bathed and never showered.

January 1, 2013

Atavism
Inside my puppy's rubber toy
A tiny mechanical squeak,
Designed I think to evoke in him
A smaller animal's dying shriek.

Missed
Opportunity knocked on my door.
A second knock, then a third one.
He was wearing thick woolen gloves.
Deaf in one ear, I never heard one.

Titles
Fifty plus years of writing verse.
I read over the long, long list:
So many turns of the mind's millwheel,
Such a heap of mealy grist.

Clerihew: Cody
William Frederick Cody
For his Wild West Show hired many a roadie.
He felt the old urge to kill
When anyone called him American Bison Bill.

Conflict of Interest
Benjamin Franklin smiled,
Signing the Declaration,
Proud of the small part
He'd played in the minting of it,

Though he was disappointed
That somebody else's shop
Would get the government
Contract for the printing of it.

Geometers
The old Euclidean Greeks
Derived from what they did
A great deep pleasure.

They held the big round world
Flat in their minds--and then,
They took its measure.