WHY THE TELEPHONE WIRES DIP AND THE POLES ARE CRACKED AND CROOKED
The old men say
young men in gray
hung this thread across our plains
acres and acres ago.
But we, the enlightened, know
in point of fact it’s what remains
of the flight of a marvellous crow
no one saw:
Each pole, a caw.
THE POPULATION OF ARGENTINA
The Rand McNally Co.:
How little does it know!
How much those clerks have missed
Who blithely list
Argentina’s pop. as four-
Teen million, and no more,
And even slightly less!
Why, I can count
Twice that amount
By skimming through the columns of the daily press.
For every new edition
Sees another harried soul
Seek a haven from sedition,
Flee assassins, jump parole,
Or escape a harsh decision
Of the anti-vice patrol
By visiting that vast arena
Of refugees called Argentina.
On the pampas, it is certain,
Lounges Richard Halliburton,
Adolf Hitler, Martha Raye,
Leon Trotsky’s ex-valet,
Greta Garbo, Mildred Fletcher,
“Fingers” Pico—you can betcher
Bottom dollar they are there,
Inhaling bueno air,
As well
As seven aunts of Sun Yat-sen,
Plus ten
Lost Tribes of Israel,
Side by side
With every Balkan prince who never died.
Rand, recount; recount, McNally:
There’s been some slip-up in your tally;
Count Argentinian heads again.
Search every cellar, scan each alley,
And you’ll discover Axis Sally
Playing cribbage with Hart Crane.
EVEN EGRETS ERR
Egregious was the egret’s error, very.
Egressing from a swamp, the bird eschewed
No egriot (a sour kind of cherry)*
It saw, and reaped extremest egritude.§
* * *
* Obs.
§ Rare form of obs. Aegritude, meaning sickness.
SCENIC
O when in San Francisco do
As natives do: they sit and stare
And smile and stare again. The view
Is visible from anywhere.
Here hills are white with houses whence,
Across a multitude of sills,
The owners, lucky residents,
See other houses, other hills.
The meanest San Franciscan knows,
No matter what his sins have been,
There are a thousand patios
Whose view he is included in.
The Golden Gate, the cable cars,
Twin Peaks, the Spreckels habitat,
The local ocean, sun, and stars—
When fog falls, one admires that.
Here homes are stacked in such a way
That every picture window has
An unmarred prospect of the Bay
And, in its center, Alcatraz.
RECITATIVE FOR SORELY TESTED PRODUCTS
I was once a tire. To bolster sales
My cunning maker filled me full of nails.
My treads were shredded. I was made a flat
By great machines designed to do just that.
I was a typewriter. Harsh was my test.
Ten years I toiled unoiled without a rest.
One billion times, so claim the pedagogues,
The quick brown foxes jumped my lazy cogs.
I used to be a watch. My tick and tock
Were interchanged by polychronic shock.
The bit of bounce my spring retained was sapped
By tales of clocks alarmed, of watches strapped.
I am a shears. My thin lips prophesy
The Day to Come when angles cloud the sky,
When rugs rise up, mute tools get out of hand,
And sorely tested products scourge the land.
All:
Then, then, the Holy Catalogue avers,
Will products test their manufacturers.
CAPACITY
CAPACITY 26 PASSENGERS
—sign in a bus
Affable, bibulous,
corpulent, dull,
eager-to-find-a-seat,
formidable,
garrulous, humorous,
icy, jejune,
knockabout, laden-
with-luggage (maroon),
mild-mannered, narrow-necked,
oval-eyed, pert,
querulous, rakish,
seductive, tart, vert-
iginous, willowy,
xanthic (or yellow),
young, zebuesque are my
passengers fellow.
V. B. NIMBLE, V. B. QUICK
Science, Pure and Applied, by V. B. Wigglesworth, F.R.S., Quick Professor of Biology in the University of Cambridge.
—a talk listed in the B.B.C. Radio Times
V. B. Wigglesworth wakes at noon,
Washes, shaves, and very soon
Is at the lab; he reads his mail,
Tweaks a tadpole by the tail,
Undoes his coat, removes his hat,
Dips a spider in a vat
Of alkaline, phones the press,
Tells them he is F.R.S.,
Subdivides six protocells,
Kills a rat by ringing bells,
Writes a treatise, edits two
Symposia on “Will Man Do?,”
Gives a lecture, audits three,
Has the Sperm Club in for tea,
Pensions off an aging spore,
Cracks a test tube, takes some pure
Science and applies it, finds
His hat, adjusts it, pulls the blinds,
Instructs the jellyfish to spawn,
And, by one o’clock, is gone.
TUNE, IN AMERICAN TYPE
Set and printed in Great Britain by Tonbridge Printers, Ltd., Peach Hall Works, Tonbridge, in Times nine on ten point, on paper made by John Dickenson at Croxley, and bound by James Burn at Esher.
—colophon in a book published by Michael Joseph (London)
Ah, to be set and printed in
Great Britain now that Tonbridge Prin-
ters, Limited, employ old John
Dickenson, at Croxley. On
his pages is Times nine-on-ten-
point type impressed, and, lastly, when
at Peach Hall Works the job is done,
James Burn at Esher’s job’s begun.
Hey nonny nonny nonny,
Hey nonny nonny nay!
Tonbridge! Croxley! Esher! Ah,
is there, in America,
a tome contrived in such sweet towns?
No. English, English are the downs
w2here Jim Burn, honest craftsman, winds
beneath his load of reams; he binds
the sheets that once John Dickenson
squeezed flat from British pulp. Hey non-
ny nonny, etc.
LAMENT, FOR COCOA
The scum has come.
My cocoa’s cold.
The cup is numb,
And I grow old.
It seems an age
Since from the pot
It bubbled, beige
And burning hot—
Too hot to be
Too quickly quaffed.
Accordingly,
I found a draft
And in it placed
The boiling brew
And took a taste
Of toast or two.
Alas, time flies
And minutes chill;
My cocoa lies
Dull brown and still.
How wearisome!
In
likelihood,
The scum, once come,
Is come for good.
SONG OF THE OPEN FIREPLACE
When silly Sol in winter roisters
And roasts us in our closed-up cloisters
Like hosts of out-of-season oysters,
The logs glow red.
When Sol grows cool and solely caters
To polar bears and figure skaters
And homes are turned refrigerators,
The flames are dead.
And when idyllically transpires
The merger every man desires
Of air that nips and wood that fires,
It’s time for bed.
MARCH: A BIRTHDAY POEM
for Elizabeth
My child as yet unborn, the doctors nod,
Agreeing that your first month shall be March,
A time of year I know by heart and like
To talk about—I, too, was born in March.
March, like November a month largely unloved,
Parades before April, who steals all shows
With his harlequinade of things renewed.
Impatient for that pastel fool’s approach,
Our fathers taunted March, called him Hlyd-monath,
Though the month is mild, and a murmurer.
Indeed, after the Titan’s fall and shatter
Of February, March seems a silence.
The Romans, finding February’s ruins
At the feet of March, heard his wind as boasting
And hailed his guilt with a war-god’s name.
As above some street in a cobbled sea-town
From opposing walls two huge boards thrust
To advertise two inns, so do the signs
Of Pisces the Fish and Aries the Ram
Overhang March. Depending on the day,
Your fortunate gem shall be the bloodstone
Or the diamond, your lucky color crimson
Or silver gray. You shall prove affable,
Impulsive, lucky in your friends, or cross,
According to the counterpoint of stars.
So press your business ventures, wear cravats,
And swear not by the moon. If you plant wheat,
Do it at dawn. The same for barley. Let
The tide transplant kohlrabi, leeks, and beans.
Toward the month’s end, sow hardy annuals.
It was this month when Caesar fell, Stalin died,
And Beethoven. In this month snowflakes melt—
Those last dry crusts that huddle by the barn.
Now kites and crocuses are hoisted up.
Doors slap open. Dogs snuffle soggy leaves,
Rehearsing rusty repertoires of smells.
The color of March is the one that lies
On the shadow side of young tree trunks.
March is no land of extremes. Dull as life,
It offers small flowers and minor holidays.
Clouds stride sentry and hold our vision down,
While underfoot the agony of roots
Is hidden by earth. Much, much is opaque.
The thunder bluffs, wind cannot be gripped,
And kites and crocuses are what they are.
Still, child, it is far from a bad month,
For all its weight of compromise and hope.
As modest as a monk, March shall be there
When on that day without a yesterday
You, red and blind and blank, gulp the air.
POETESS
At verses she was not inept,
Her feet were neatly numbered.
She never cried, she softly wept,
She never slept, she slumbered.
She never ate and rarely dined;
Her tongue found sweetmeats sour.
She never guessed, but oft divined
The secrets of a flower.
A flower! Fragrant, pliant, clean,
More dear to her than crystal.
She knew what yearnings dozed between
The stamen and the pistil.
Dawn took her thither to the wood,
At even, home she hithered.
Unto the gentle, Pan is good—
She never died, she withered.
POOEM
Writing here last autumn of my hopes of seeing a hoopoe …
—Sir Stephen Tallents in the London Times
I, too, once hoped to have a hoopoe
Wing its way within my scoopoe,
Crested, quick, and heliotroopoe,
Proud Upupa epops.
For what seemed an eternity,
I sat upon a grassy sloopoe,
Gazing through a telescoopoe,
Weaving snares of finest roopoe,
Fit for Upupa epops.
At last, one day, there came to me,
Inside a crusty enveloopoe,
This note: “Abandon hope, you doopoe;
The hoopoe is a misanthroopoe.
(Signed) Your far-off friend, U. e.”
AN IMAGINABLE CONFERENCE
(Mr. Henry Green, Industrialist, and Mr. Wallace Stevens, Vice-President of the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co., Meet in the Course of Business)
Exchanging gentle grips, the men retire,
prologued by courteous bumbling at the door,
retreat to where a rare room deep exists
on an odd floor, subtly carpeted. The walls
wear charts like checkered vests and blotters ape
the green of cricket fields. Glass multiplies
the pausing men to twice infinity.
An inkstand of blue marble has been carven:
no young girl’s wrist is more discreetly veined.
An office boy misplaced and slack intrudes,
apologizes speaking without commas
“Oh sorry sirs I thought” which signifies
what wellmeant wimbly wambly stuff it is
we seem to be made of. Beyond the room,
a gander sun’s pure rhetoric ferments
imbroglios—zut!—of bloom. The stone is so.
The pair confers in murmurings, with words
select and Sunday-soft. No more is known,
but rumor goes that as they hatched the deal,
vistas of lilac weighted their shrewd lids.
SUNFLOWER
Sunflower, of flowers
the most lonely,
yardstick of hours,
long-term stander
in empty spaces,
shunner of bowers,
indolent bender
seldom, in only
the sharpest of showers:
tell us, why
is it your face is
a snarl of jet swirls
and gold arrows, a burning
old lion face high
in a cornflower sky,
yet by turning
your head, we find
you wear a girl’s
bonnet behind?
THE STORY OF MY LIFE
Fernando Valenti, enthusiast, Yale graduate, and himself represented by numerous recordings of Scarlatti.
—The Saturday Review
Enthused I went to Yale, enthused
I graduated. Still infused
with this enthusiasm when
Scarlatti called, I answered enthusiastically, and thus
I made recordings numerous,
so numerous that I am classed,
quite simply, as “enthusiast.”
THE NEWLYWEDS
After a one-day honeymoon, the Fishers rushed off to a soft drink bottlers’ convention, then on to a ball game, a TV rehearsal and a movie preview.
—Life
“We’re married,” said Eddie.
Said Debbie, “Incredi-
ble! When is our honey-
moon?” “Over and done,” he
replied. “Feeling logy?
Drink Coke.” “Look at Yogi
go!” Debbie cried. “Groovy!”
“Reh
earsal?” “The movie.”
“Some weddie,” said Debbie.
Said Eddie, “Yeah, mebbe.”
HUMANITIES COURSE
Professor Varder handles Dante
With wry respect; while one can see
It’s all a lie, one must admit
The “beauty” of the “imagery.”
Professor Varder slyly smiles,
Describing Hegel as a “sage”;
But still, the man has value—he
Reflects the “temper” of his “age.”
Montaigne, Tom Paine, St. Augustine:
Although their notions came to naught,
They still are “crucial figures” in
The “pageantry” of “Western thought.”
ENGLISH TRAIN COMPARTMENT
These faces make a chapel where worship comes easy:
Homo enim naturaliter est animal sociale.
The flutter of a Guardian, the riveted image
of Combe-in-Teignhead, faded by decades of eyes,
the sting of smoke, the coughs, the whispering
lend flavor to piety’s honest bone.
Half-sick, we suck our teeth, consult our thumbs,
through brown-stained glass confront the barbered hills
and tailored trees of a tame and castrate land.
Sheep elegant enough for any eclogue
browse under Constable clouds. The unnatural
darkness swells, and passengers stir
at the sound of tapping fingernails. Rain,
beginning, hyphenates our racing windows.
And hands and smiles are freed by the benediction.
The lights, always on, now tell. One man talks,