Tuesday, June 26, 2012

A THOUGHT FOR AVERILL


“I learned life is not personal,” the poet Averill Curdy writes in his piece in the July/August 2012 Poetry magazine.
You learned wrong, Averill. Life is nothing if not personal. 
We go to colleges of some prestige to learn to distance ourselves from the all-to-personal aspect of life. We come away somewhat shielded, perhaps with veneration for those who went before us into that good night untouched, unfettered by the insatiable personal-ness of it all.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

OH REALLY LAWRENCE?


 I rail against Ferlinghetti’s premise:
“there is what used to be called the ‘mystery of Woman,’
a romantic concept that endowed her with an illusive inscrutable
allure, both sexual and spiritual. 
Then the feminist revolution brought Woman down from her
pedestal.”
What pedestal? I ask.
Raped in back alleys, suffering back-room abortions, or
raising children alone in ghetto apartments?
Where is the allure of a screaming child,
going without enough to eat, warm clothes to wear,
or a man to hold him and to mold his character?
No mystery in the drudgery of waitress
days, spent
Standing on swollen feet, 10, 12 hours at
a stretch.
No allure in broken bones, 
swollen lips or blackened eyes
suffered by battered women.
“the feminist revolution,” Lawrence,
freed women from their bondage
of male fantasy, Romantic pedagogy,
and unspoken suffering.
Take your wistfulness, Lawrence,
o’re fantasy lost
And shove It.

Monday, June 18, 2012

SIMPLE PLEASURES


I like the concave
shape of a spoon,
it’s simple symmetry
of curve and line.
“He liked to spoon,”
she said.
And I thought of you.
Curved  ’gainst my back,
or I ’gainst yours,
we’d drift 
eluding consciousness --
Two travelers in the
world of counterpane,
intent on hedonistic pleasures
of the gentlest kind.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

ONE COW AT A TIME


Angie wanted to give a milk-producing waterbuffalo to a poor family.
She’d read it was the thing to do so families in developing countries
could have enough milk to drink. And some to sell.
She’d read it On one of those “Save The World” websites.
But why send good American Dollars to The Sudan? Angie thought.
She saved her dimes and quarters, 
And by December had enough to buy the cow.
She sent it to a family whose name she found on the web,
the address suggested a tenement apartment on the Lower East side
of Chicago.
Angie felt good about the gift.
But somehow the waterbuffalo gift Didn’t turn out right.
Sure, the family had more than enough milk, 
But the Housing Authority made them move.
Go Figure