Nineteen Clerihews

John Adams
Never visited houses managed by madams.
He remained faithful, without fail,
To Abigail.

Fred Astaire
Epitomized savoir-faire.
Onscreen he never did anything gauche,
Not even with Nina Foch.

Karl Benz
Viewed the world through an engineer's lens.
His vision, of course,
Was of a carriages without a horse.

Leonard Bernstein
Seldom showed a stern mien.
You could see for half a mile
His smile.

Ambrose Bierce
Wrote prose somewhat fierce.
Despite the fame of him,
No one knows whatever became of him.

Daniel Boone's kin
All wore caps made of coonskin.
Because shooting animals was Daniel's passion
He supplied the family's headwear fashion.

Alessandro Botticellii
Painted women large in buttocks and belly.
Seeing the ads in Vogue he would not find sexy
Models so very anorexy.

The Bronte girls--Charlotte, Emily, and Anne
Rarely gazed lustily at a man.
They reserved most of their leering looks
For books.

Paul Bryant
For years was on segregation reliant.
Beaten by USC, he saw the light
And fielded a team only partly white.

George Burns
Did not cultivate ferns.
He left gardening to his spacey
Wife Gracie.

Aaron Burr
In his lifetime created quite a stir.
What added to the fire of his fame some fuel
Was killing Hamilton in a duel.

Julius Caesar
Never became an old geezer.
Stabbed to death in his fifties he was heard to say,
"Et tu, Brute?"

Lewis Carroll
Wore the simplest of apparel.
Every High Street shop window in Oxford town
Reflected him in an Oxford gown.

Miguel de Cervantes
Often put on women's panties.
He did so not to be erotic,
Just quixotic.

Raymond Chandler
Of fictional facts was a creful handler.
He armed Philip Marlow
With a pistol, not a knife by Barlow.

Agatha Christie
Had a period in her life that remains misty.
She once disappeared from public view,
Leaving not a clue.

John Ciardi
Preferred grappa to Bacardi.
Always beneath his cark Italian eyes,
A word to the wise.

William Clark
Rode with Meriwether Lewis in a canoe of bark.
They alternated paddling, each in turn:
One in the bow, one in the stern.

Wendy Cope
Must have many times said, "Nope."
What else can we think when
Her most famous poems in titled "Bloody Men."

Some Older Stuff

A Prayer for Judas
"inter pontem et fontem..."
Judas, the coins flung away he'd been given for a kiss,
In despair went off and sought the suicide's abyss.

Around his neck sad Judas arranged a snake of rope
And stepped into the darkness of those devoid of hope.

I pray the God of Jesus allowed His Judas light
In that eternal instant before the noose jerked tight--

And pray such grace be granted to each of us at our end
Who still live on as traitors with silver yet to spend.


Birthday Prayer
September 1998
On the Psalmist's page it simply reads,
"Three score years and ten."
Of my life sixty years are past
And will not come again.

And so, perhaps, I've ten years left--
Only half a Scripture score--
Yet time enough, I say, by God,
To learn a little more.

But then I think in my old way,
What else have I to learn?
I know by now how near is death,,
How quick short candles burn.

Oh, Author of that Bible page,
If ten more years I live,
What knowledge known to You alone
Have I to fear you'll give?


Timepiece
Growing old my body grows thin.
My heavy watch on its metal links
Slips down around my slender wrist
And turns its darkened face from me.

With a shake I make it again
Upright on my lifted left hand.
The numbers properly in place,
I see how late I soon shall be.

.

Masterpiece Theater
Snobbish liberal friends of mine--
Over sandwiches made with watercress--
On Super Bowl Sunday night
Chose to tune in PBS.


Pop-Up Thought
Edison, Tesla, and Steinmetz--
Engineers whom I love the most.
Thanks to them I own an appliance
That makes me perfect toast.


Evanescence
The thick pages of old anthologies
Are heavily freighted and taxed
With poets writing of beauteous snow--
How eloquently have they waxed!

I have searched, but never came across
One single word of what those poets felt
In the following post-rapturous days
When with wet feet they watched the damned stuff melt.


The Old Formalist at the Library
Big thick books daunt me
As further into life I age.
Will I live to finish this?
I think, as I look at the number
On the far last page.


Redrafting
Faced with failure, "Back to the old drawing board"
Was once our rueful declaration.
Nowadays technology's progress requires
That we say, "Back to the old CAD station."


Assimilation
I know a native Southerner
Who's lived too long in New York.
So apostate has he become,
He eats fried chicken with a fork.

The Idea of Disorder 
at Coney Island
Wallace Stevens wrote his father
That the Atlantic Ocean was
"...dirty, wobbly, and wet."

All these many years later
I concur with his assessment:
It's all three of them yet.


Telephone
Where the receiver is received
Is called a cradle.

How often, after bad news,
Have you laid it down

As you might
A finally fallen asleep baby.


Parochially Schooled
Unlike others, I was as happy as
A Beatrix Potter rabbit,
Being taught by schoolmarm nuns,
Each with chalk dust on her habit.

From them I learned to read, to write,
And do math at its lowest range.
Now I can scratch out a grocery list
And verify my change.

Sisters, surely with God in Heaven
Whose love for me you also taught,
Pray for at least one former pupil
Remembering with grateful thought.


In Principio
When Willie Yeats was a little lad
Did he pee against Sligo trees?
Or play Gaelic football roughly
And scab his skinny knees?

Ah, no. He simply sat and listened
To Irish peasants and their tales
Which he later turned in London
Into grand poetic sales.

So when you see a spectacled boy
Being bookish, pale and wan,
Reflect: he might one day write some verse
As good as Leda's Swan.


Scribality
The world began to become connected,
To be faintly faultily linked
When the unseen thoughts of man and things
Came to be permanently inked.

Some Dickinson Stuff

An Alumna of the Mt. Holyoke
Female Seminary Meets a Townsman
--Boston Common 1853
I encountered a man from Amherst
And inquired, "How's dear Em?"
He lowered his eyes, gave a cough,
And started out, "Ahem..."

"Well, ma'am, it's a hard thing to report,
But we in the Town all fear
That Emily's going--" he touched his head--
"A little strange up here."

"Oh, no!" I cried, and then, "How so?
Whatever can you mean?
When I left, she was the sanest girl
The Town had ever seen!"

"Oh, that she was," the man agreed,
"But lately, I'm afraid,
She stays upstairs in her little room
Behind a pulled-down shade."

"What of it, sir?" I cried again,
"That doesn't make her mad!"
And then the Amherst man went on,
"Now brace yourself--it's bad--

The news that you have wrung from me--
I fear that it gets worse--"
Then he leaned and whispered in my ear,
"She's taken to writing Verse."

I staggered back in utter shock:
I knew it was the end--
Writing Verse is a certain sign
One's gone around the bend.

Oh, I wept all night for my sweet Em--
That angel bright and pure--
For having fallen victim to The Verse,
The Disease that has no Cure.

Electronic Emily
Out upon--the World
She gazed from--Upper Room
Recluse--and all in White
Her eye--a Camera Zoom

Not to mention--how
Her Ear--that Microphone
Picked up--from Miles off
The way--that Flowers groan

God made--in Amherst
The first--of VCR's
A faithful--Taper of
Light--from faroff Stars

In Amherst, Once...
A little girl was startled by a snake
Passing her foot in the grass.
This caused a constriction in her body,
A puckering of her ass.

She grew up to be a poet,
Writing all artfully alone,
And changed the true location
To an even truer bone.

Autre Temps, Autre Moeurs
Just as you might, for a treat,
Drive your kids down to the seashore
To enjoy the waves,

The Dickinsons would sometimes
Ride Emily out to the edge of town
To enjoy the graves.

Emily at the Plate
From its Mound--the World hurls
To wait at Home--takes Nerve
Many--can hit--the Fast Ball
But ah--so few--the Curve


Conversation
"Vesuvius dont talk--Etna--dont..."
--Emily Dickinson in a "Master" letter
"Okay, Em. We won't"
The mountains replied
And kept, mostly, like her,
Their lava inside.

Miss Lonelyhearts' Revenge
An obscure Miss E. Dickinson
Once wrote off for advice from
One of Boston's leading sages.

In Bartlett's book he owns one line
While she alone holds title to
Five double-columned pages.

Tabloid Retraction
"When Emily Dickinson praised poetry
that made her 'feel physically as if the top
of my head were taken off,' she was calling
for deeper endorphin payloads"
--Brad Leithhauser, "The Confinement of Free Verse"
Miss Dickinson, interviewed
While weeding her small hyphen-
ated garden on the lower slope
Of Mt. Parnassus, Massachusetts,
Denied ever using or even condoning the use
Of endorphins at any time or in any mode.

"Much less," she added, in her
Characteristic Upper Case voice,
"Would I ever, ever--Employ
So ugly a word as Pay-load."

Editorial Board Meeting
"[Houghton Mifflin] thought that Higginson
must be losing his mind to recommend such stuff
[the poems of Emily Dickinson].
Higginson has snapped. He's lost his mind.
This old maid's book will never sell.
We do not mean to be unkind,
But Higginson's snapped. He's lost his mind.
Her stuff is raw and unrefined--
As cracked as the Liberty Bell.
Yes, Higginson's snapped. He's lost his mind.
This old maid's book will never sell.

Amherst Power & Light
When I back up my verse on floppy disks,
As the hard drive is going around,
I think of Emily sewing up her poems
In little packets to be found.

How truly blest was she, dear Emily--
She of the artful, telling dash--
Never in all her life had she to fear
A computer's sudden crash.

Policy
"We do not publish poetry...."
--"Guidelines for Contributors"
The Emily Dickinson Journal
We do not publish poetry? That's true.
Prose is the medium we employ.
What Emily did, we do not do.
We do not publish poetry. It's true.
We have no space for verse that's new.
Our journal's a tool and not a toy.
We do not publish poetry? Quite true.
Prose is the medium we employ.

Ceremony at West Cemetery
Who bore Emily's body to her grave,
Soul already with the Lord?
Kelley and Moynihan and Sullivan,
Cashman, Scannell, and Ward.

The pallbearers, a bunch of Paddies
Who worked on her father's grounds,
Were of the Select Society
Who boxed her Out of Bounds.

Her feathery body, worn by beating
Against the Cage of God,
Rode the shoulders of six Irish Micks
To be covered with New Sod.

Famine-hardened, they did not weep
At the World's and Amherst's loss,
But, shovels down, I see them all
Making the Sign of the Cross.

Assimilation
I know a native Southerner
Who's lived too long in New York.
So apostate has he become,
He eats fried chicken with a fork.


At Second and Arch...
The Widow Ross had an upholstery shop
And there she sewed some flags,
Spangled with five-pointed stars
That she made from petticoat rags.

Historians deny she was the first
To make the banner with needled thread.
Despite all the debunking critics, though,
Betsy lives in the American head.

As the Italians say, "If it's not true,
It remains a well-made story,"
Better in fact than Captain Driver's
And the relic called Old Glory.


Brief Winter Storm, Atlanta
In the evening the snow descends.
The streets are hushed.
In the morning, the sun ascends.
The streets are slushed.


Clerihew: Astaire II
Fred Astaire
Epitomized savoir-faire.
Onscreen he never did anything gauche,
Not even with Nina Foch.


Fame
Some poets achieve success in this life.
Others must wait for Posterity's rewards.
Edgar Guest owned a Cadillac.
The rest?  Banged-up Fords.

Fifteen Quatrains

Schadenfreude
Face it--there's a dirty secret
That's common to us all:
We go to the circus hoping
The acrobats will fall.

Quod Erat Non Demonstrandum
Reading of man's immateriality
In a book by an Eastern sage
I licked spit upon my finger
Every time I turned a page.

Urban College of Art
How fortunate is the young artist
Who is in the city set:
To have all those subway posters
With no mustaches yet.

Troop Movements
War is less a matter
Of bold Homeric scenes
Than that of thousand and thousands
Of makeshift latrines.

Tuition
My first lesson in deception?
I learned it as a kid--
When a young girl said to me,
"Let's not and say we did."

Vocatio
Even in my small Latin
I know my true temper:
Aliquando vates,
Versificator semper.

The Old Fan
Perfection? Perfection?
What do I know of that?
Bob Gibson on the mound--
Ted Williams at the bat.

On Learning that Annette Funicello Has M.S.
Death, that dirty old guy
With the biggest and blackest of ears
Is all of a sudden doing his dance
Among the Mousketeers.

On Learning that Heaney Cleared a Cool Million
Too many people think poets are ethereal,
Unconcerned with the things of this earth.
When they told Yeats that he'd won the Nobel Prize,
His first words were, "How much is it worth?"

On the Source of Poetry
Tell me, do you ever think
How defensively act the squid?
Troubled, they throw up screens of ink
In the way that I just did.

On the Quatrain
Even in the confining space
Of a four-wheeled circus cage
The pacing impatient tiger
Can perfectly express his rage.

On the Indifference of Nature
Pine trees fall in Southern woods
To make paper of all kinds:
Some sheets will bear immortal poems
And others will wipe behinds.

On a Highbrow Poetry Reading
I didn't like his reading.
I didn't like it at all.
He read as though his jockey shorts
Were a size and a half too small.

A Thought for the 17th of March
It was for the Irish Church a thing of great luck
That Patrick, trying to put the Trinity over,
Did not bend down and happen to pluck
A piece of four-leaf clover.

Annual Occurrence
Now it is autumn and all over the civilized world
They are being trucked in, bound and smelling of
Clean and slickly coated paper, the calendars

Of the coming years, to all the stores where we buy time--
Book and office supply and drug, even some
Once known as stationery with an e and not an a.

The year-to-come comes with all its ordered squares
Properly numerated, month after month, day after day,
With or without sentimental four-color covering prints.

Their salmon-like arrival at the banks of time's river
Manifests once more the human hope of a future,
As filled with faith as paintings on the walls of caves,

Even though for some there lies within those leaves
One unmarked day when they will never again
Feel anymore the need to confirm any dates at all.


Denial
You urge me to look upon the table
At the spread-out cards of my losing hand.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

Yes, I clearly heard the words, "Be realistic."
I caught the tone of your stern command.
I turn my head and murmur Becket's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

I listened to you listing all the many ways
Things went ill, the bad results of all I planned.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's word:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

You tell me to face the unavoidable music
Like a Civil War soldier behind the band.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

While you are admonishing me, my imagination
Flees to some far place, let us say, Samarkand.
I turn my head and murmur Beckett's words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?

Few are the patient people who can wait
For the clear day when others will understand
What Sam Beckett meant when he wrote the words:
Who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?