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?

<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