A drinking song
“Honeysuckle. So named because of the old
but entirely erroneous idea that bees extracted
honey therefrom. The honeysuckle is useless to
the bee.”
What, then, is useful to the bee?
My world, penned in by human pride
Allows me to see as I see
Through the two eyes on either side
Of one nose – unlike the bee
Who sports two eyes for domestic tasks
And three ocelli
To make impressionistic tracks
Among the flowering vegetation –
What can I know
About such kinds of navigation
About what it’s like to go
About, laughing up your sleeve
At the honeysuckle’s vain imposture?
I don’t even bring in the sheeves.
I lay on my sheets as useless as an oyster.
Geography lesson
A blues for the rich girl
Exhilaration and depression
Joined hands above my cradle
One voice
Issued from two mouths
How can I
How can I sur...
How can I survive
Such tremendous patronage?
Either gloria in excelsis deo
Of mini golf
In the abyss
- darling turn out the light
I will run away
And slay giants
On the way to the ruin
Of God’s castle.
Uncaught.
Untaught.
When Ms. M.M. visited Wallace Stevens
At his office building where there were
“eleven or twelve white marble columns along the façade”
(her famous precision on parade
but not too much – there’s the fatal “or”
to remind us of what poetry is for
and of what good manners requires as well)
and a wide window, otherwise indescribable
letting the banal Connecticut sunlight through.
No doubt Mr. Stevens had a lot to do
But he did show M.M. his secretarial pool
where the actuarial tools
were applied, and procedures for getting reimbursed
if your property had been cursed
by fire, theft, or a smell in the air.
The girls all smiled. “They aren’t bothered with strikes there;
the girls at the Hartford have it nice.”
Said Ms. M. M. – do her words take a slice?
Or were they just words, and thus meant quite sincerely?
Then it was over as begun, over merely.
Neither one showed the other the truth
- that they were monsters, monsters on the loose.
