ONOMATOPOEIA
One thing about this type of education, it certainly taught an
individual to be philosophical about death.
He could ruminate conversably on the ultimate fate of a Greek
shade or the Mesopotamian interpretation of the underworld.
Even contemplate figuratively what Achilles felt was his true
funeral abode.
Shoel. The grave. Romantic poetry might have little practical
application but it was great conversational stuff.
A book or two by obscure authors sure broke the ice at parties,
was unbeatable verbal jousting.
Too bad the joke was on him for majoring in it.
Few people really cared what onomatopoeia was or that
Presquile was in Maine. Worse, they acted like you were nuts
for studying the Aeneid. The Aeneid! It did, too, have
importance. Literature, that is.
Why it gave a man depth, a presence, a gracefulness that
transcended petty, material strivings. Too bad, one couldn't
show the white palms of one's hand for a living or revel in soft
flesh as the natural mark of a born aristocrat. O tempora, oh
mores: that the classics had fallen so low.
It was maddening that literary civilization was within a hair's
breadth at being snuffed by the ordinary convention of task
bearing.
Being a poet, so basic to everything, didn't even show up on
Manpower's computer scan.
The universities didn't care they were having the times of their
lives parsing verbs and conjugating declensions, telling
graduates "the pendulum will swing".
The best retort for that was the pithy epigram of the working
man toiling in honest sweat within the secure bounds of a trade.
[52]
AT THE RED THROAT
In youth, Death was
a puny boy possessing but
wormy hands & fleshless fingers
as in Witch Hazel
or Scrooge's Future Ghost
--that insipid Evil One
Hansel so easily outwitted
in a gingerbread house.
Time brought increased notoriety.
Saucy times with a soupçon of respect
for the artful dodger.
Givens change, an armful of
orange lilies, limp & loathsome,
on a tombstone door
before trumpets of rain.
Graven images. Lifeless stone.
Death became stone.
Stone empty. The maggot emptiness
burrowing into chiselled easel and
the stone-cutter's savage magic.
Just a bitty stone
to herald a passing.
Night-jars.
Old straw-chairs with
a broom pronouncing
the wall base with its touch empty,
the empress of bandages
leaning to rags
on table scraps,
sorry gloom of an old building
by a pickled lake
leaking into ebb twilight.
The coronation of the nightmare,
the moon with her billowing robes and withered spoon
unfolding midstream ...
la cauchemar ou
dénudée soirée
to discover, with wonder, ices with sherbet
reek like nightsweats;
a windsail of pooled light
thru puddles of trees.
Brackish backwater--
thoughts of black ice
and huddled masses of silver
breaking thru the sun's
winter curtain as erupting coins.
[53]