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.