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.