The Best American Poetry

Leonard Koan Haiku [by Jim Cummins]

Empty bell.  Sex with
a narcissist is the sound
of one hand clapping.

-- Jim Cummins

Of "Leonard Koan Haiku," Cummins writes: "I see this poem wearing a hat."

ELLISTON POET, R.I.P. – part 3 [by Jim Cummins]

(read Part I and Part 2 of this series)

When I moved back to Cincinnati in 1975, I began collecting Cincinnati quotes—references to the city in books, magazines, the popular media, etc.  Sort of along the lines of Berryman’s reference to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in one of his Dream Songs: “I saw in my dream the great lost cities, Macchu Picchu, Cambridge, Mass., Angkor … “  Or Eliot’s, in a letter to, I believe I remember correctly, Conrad Aiken, or was it MacLeish: “Cambridge seems to me a dull nightmare now … “  Of course, Cincinnati wasn’t as bad as all that—and it was certainly prettier than Cambridge—so I was just being defensive.  I’d put off adulthood for as long as I could; it was just that starting out seemed worse here.  Staring into the dark, empty Ohio night brought to mind Nietzsche’s abyss—except, instead of staring back at you, it fell asleep. 

Hence, my Cincinnati quotebook.  A particularly good one was Wilfred Sheed’s crack, made in The NY Times Book Review, which I quoted in my last post.  There were many others; I really do have them in a notebook somewhere.  But my all-time favorite was one from a TV series I never watched an episode of, though I saw the particular excerpt not once but twice.  Serendipity, of a sort.  It was from a Columbo scene, in which the rumpled, passive-aggressive sleuth knocked on the hotel door of a high-priced hooker played by Valerie Harper.  Valerie’s character was pretty jaded, and she was expecting a customer from Ohio, a dentist, I think.  When she opened the door, instead of the condescending sonofabitch who was going to namby-pamby her ass into admitting something crucial, she saw a crumpled ball of repression from the hinterlands.  She left the door open, turning away and waving him in, as she flung back patronizingly over her shoulder, “Oh, don’t be so Cincinnati!”

“Don’t be so Cincinnati!”!  From Valerie Harper!  We were being condescended to by Rhoda, for god’s sake!  That was brutal, a new low.  But this was the hotbed of provincialism that John Ashbery, the most sophisticated poet on the planet, the Genius of the Age, flew into in the winter of 1979, to be the Elliston Poet-in-Residence for ten weeks.

I’d begun reading John’s work in 1970, introduced to it by David Schloss, starting with The Double Dream of Spring, a life-changing experience for me.  I suppose I should say I didn’t have a clue about the work, but in truth I had many clues; your life doesn’t change without clues.  But I was staggered and perplexed and in awe of those poems.  More than that, I was thrilled.  What I felt but couldn’t say then was that we’ve got it turned around:  the unconscious isn’t images we try to find language for, try to describe.  The unconscious is language, words working together below conscious restriction and ordering.  The whole word, if you will, wholly felt.  Words bond in the unconscious, creating pictures for us, or pathways of new logic.

So I didn’t look at words as flat, two-dimensional, but as many-sided, with volume, capable of combining in a multitude of possibilities.  Remember that toy from way back when, the Magic 8 Ball?  It had a many-sided ball in it (an “icosahedral die”—I looked it up!), on whose flat planes “answers” had been printed in raised metal letters, that floated in black ink.  You asked it a question, then tilted it to one side, and read the answer.  One can only see the top of the word on a printed page, but there were many more sides to it in the ink below.  I saw JA’s language as containing this power—my pathetic description of it pales in the face of its dynamism, its depth and range—yoked to surface recognitions of sentence structure, pattern, clichés, pastiche, etc.  John’s process to me seemed the essence of “negative capability,” and his work a prodigious poetic achievement that would begin to come clear to us over the next fifty years or so.  Anyway, I thought The Double Dream of Spring was a great book, the depths of which were—to me, certainly, at 22—unfathomable, inexhaustible, yet palpably glorious and overwhelming as I held it in my hands and read it.

Okay, so I’m a fan.  So sue me.  But these were some of the thoughts I had in mind when, a better part of a decade later, I entered the room where John sat, in a suit and tie, his belly churning with the aforementioned chili, his mind trying to drop down low enough to take in a confrontation with our chairperson, the aforementioned horsewoman from the Tidewater area of Virginia, and her riding crop.  She’d been determined to make damn sure John Ashbery—despite (or maybe because of) the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle prize, and a resume from Hell-On-Wheels—wasn’t some city slicker who could just waltz in here like any ol’ body and pull the wool over our eyes!  We were the “Harvard on the Ohio,” after all!  John smiled weakly as I sat down, and said, “Is she always like that?”  I laughed.  I don’t remember which of us used the term “Professor Montezuma,” but I did reassure him it was safe to drink the water here.

For years, decades, really, I counted time by Elliston residencies; but spending time with JA stays in my heart for the sheer fun we had.  John was hilarious, brilliantly witty, of course—punning at three or four levels, in a couple of languages, is fairly standard—but a Cincinnati residency in those days cut you off from your life, your friends, your routines, and the loneliness that can develop wasn’t uncommon.  So we spent a lot of time drinking and, um, “inhaling,” and hanging out.  John would bring a record over to play, and we would get zonked and listen to the Firesign Theater or Monty Python.  This is how I got to know Dame Edna Everage (“I’m just a woman, who loves other women/I’m funny, that way …”; “The Night We Burned Mother’s Things”), and her partner, Norm—stoned, and singing along, of course.  God knows what we sounded like.  One day I got free tickets to see The Deer Hunter at a preview showing.  For some reason, lost now in the sands of time, this seemed like an important thing to do.  John couldn’t go because he had to give a poetry reading at a local college.  Would I drive him over?  Of course, but I made clear, in no uncertain terms, that I had to see this movie—I was quite the serious filmgoer, I assured him.  “Andrew Sarris on the Ohio,” I was.  Naturally, we ended up getting stoned in the car outside the reading hall, and when I took him in, the most amazing succession of faces greeted us, ending, no kidding, with a scene straight out of Bunuel.  Five identical small round nuns, all under five feet tall and wearing exactly the same glasses with black plastic frames and “coke bottle” lenses, and dressed in full penguin regalia (this was 1980), filed past us.  “Hello, Mr. Ashbery, Hello, Mr. Ashbery”—five times.  Their eyes were swimming behind the lenses.  JA literally sagged against me; I believe there was actual terror in his eyes.  “Don’t leave me,” he said plaintively; and I didn’t.  How could I have possibly thought The Deer Hunter could be better than this?  John then went onstage and gave probably the greatest reading I’ve ever heard him give.

John’s humor can be very quiet, but no less devastating for that; through it all, though, shines that incredible, luminous love of words.  Once we were going to see a locally-famous restored home, on Dayton Street in the West End.  I’d left the window of my VW Bug open the night before, and water got on the back floor.  I wasn’t aware of this until JA lifted an exquisitely-polished shoe as he exited, saying, in his inimitable way, “I think your car needs a sump pump.”  I can’t tell you how funny this was, the commentary mixing with his obvious delight in speaking the phrase, “sump pump.”  It’s funny what you remember best.  We were driving along one day, and John asked about an opera that was being performed at our College Conservatory of Music.  I said, oh, well, you know, “business was punk at the opera”—quoting, I thought, a line from his poem, “Faust,” in his second book, The Tennis Court Oath.  He corrected me, in his best professorial manner (which of course cracked us both up): “Business, if you wanted to know, was punk at the opera.”  Italics his.  But if I claim a special memory with John, it would be from a couple of years later, when John visited again, and this time, somewhat in a rush before I drove him back out to the airport, I was able to arrange a lunch at the Maisonette, a five-star French restaurant downtown, now defunct, with John, myself, my wife, Maureen, and Jean Valentine, the current Elliston Poet.  Jean had never met John.  It was pouring outside, a real deluge, and we were cozy in French elegance within.  Once in a rare while, an hour can have the texture, the density, the richness of several hours.  That day the world shrank to just our table, and we had an hour like that.  John was the sweet, kind, generous man he always is, and I was my usual happy-to-be-there self.  Rowf.  But toward the end of our stolen hour, I looked at Jean, whose eyes redeemed “shining” from John’s cliché bin.  She truly, beautifully, sparkled.  Afterwards, she told Maureen and me how much it meant to her to meet John, that she was thrilled to have had that time with him.  Only an hour out of the rain, but perfect.  Jean sent us flowers the next day.  How long ago it seems.

(ed note: John Ashbery will read at the New School, Sat. Dec 8, 7:00 pm.  Details here.)

Edmund Wilson and His Wife, Elena, Have Dinner with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Husband, Eugen Boissevain, August 6, 1948. (by Jim Cummins)

Is it hot in here, or is it just me?
They both seem so much older now than I—
can this be so? Do women age like dogs,
or something out of Wilde? Seven years
for every one we live? He cuts her meat.

Good God, that inward stare! I loved her so.
The self-absorption’s thickened like her hide.
I knew all this before, of course. I knew.
And got out early like the pig I am.
She’s jowly, tense. Elderly. It’s nineteen years …

What was Elena saying as they left?
Arm in arm, as if I’d ceased to be?
They walked along the garden for an hour,
Elena kindly offering E. her laugh.
Two women, arm in arm, whose toes I’ve—

What? What’d I say? Blurted something out—
but what? It must have been unpleasant: clouds
are forming on the brow of Mt. Monadnock.
I’ve added to the burden of his days!
Good Christ, am I going through the change?

Why are they looking at me with such hate?
Why can’t I just remember what I said?
We’ve drunk too much; we always drink too much.
I hear Herself—she calls my name loudly,
a tone of bemusement hiding her rage:

“So are you going to pass him the gravy,
or must the three of us go over there,
and by God take the boat by force?” I see
Elena’s face, alarmed; I look at Gene,
his face savage, full of remorse; then down

at those gravy-less potatoes. I stare
again at E., at E.—are we all insane?
“Of course,” I mumble, “the gravy.” I look
about wildly—thank God, it’s near my plate!
Is there no window in this goddamn house?

-- by Jim Cummins
(Paris Review & Harpers)

Ed note: Read more about Millay in here.

This post originally appeared on Dec 28, 2009

ELLISTON POET R.I.P, PART 2 [by Jim Cummins]

So last night I'm in this mellow mood--autumnal, musing. Thinking about "the old days," remembering when I asked my grandmother what it had felt like to her to have lived through horses & buggies, cars, streetcars, planes, and now [1969] a man walking on the moon. She said she didn't give a rat's ass about all that, but pulled me over to the couch where she regaled me for two hours with stories about the Church in Pittsburgh, the Mob in Pittsburgh, the priest who stood up to the Mob, the mob boss and his big funeral, presided over by the priest, which might have got mixed up with the priest's funeral that all the mob bosses attended. Whatever, she was right; autumnal musing is for wimps. Not for the first time, I'm reminded funny is the only cure for the dark.

In 1976, I was 28, and had been in the curator job for about a year. The program had fallen into a little bit of slump; we didn't really take care of our guests well. When Phil Levine showed up as Elliston Poet for ten weeks in the fall, I found I could remedy this lack on our part and have a ball in the process. Phil and I, and my wife, Maureen Bloomfield, also a poet, just hit it off; in his usual outspoken way, Phil terrified most of the department, so we had plenty of time together. The ones he didn't terrify, he alienated by beating them at tennis. "He's so fucking competitive," one of them said once. "I thought he was a poet." I nodded sagely, "Yeah, I know what you mean. Poets usually aren't competitive." But talk about pushing the dark back with funny! Phil was 48, angry, edgy, passionate, warm, sentimental, full of stories and jokes, and a great poet--just being around him made you feel all things were possible. This was his first extended residency away from home, and he missed his wife, Franny, terribly. He spoke of her and his three sons constantly at first, along with stories of his family's two years in Barcelona, the Spanish Civil War, Lorca, poetry, matadors and jockeys--and of course Detroit. Ford Rouge, Lemon, the auto parts business, his twin brother, Eddie, a painter, the escape to Iowa City, the friendships with Berryman and Gunn and Justice, et al. I'd never had such an introduction to a life and work as that; tonight I feel very grateful and affectionate.

As I said, Phil was lonely--Cincinnati is a cold place in many ways, and the university was already becoming the soulless corporate entity of the present day--and all he wanted to do was hang out and talk, eat and drink. And teach. Maureen and I lived in a tiny constricted apartment, in a building since torn down, on Jefferson Avenue. We were on the first floor; you had to knock on our living room window, so we'd know to go out into the hall and open the outer door. One of us would hear a knock, and there would be Phil in his little black raincoat, and we would be off. Or we'd put big rib-eyes on the broiler--Maureen, now a vegan, cringes at this memory--and eat and drink into the night. We loved him. We became something of a surrogate family to him; he called us his kinder, and we WERE kids, so it was okay. At 28 and 26, we were a lot younger than our years. It was not all smooth sailing. Phil felt neglected by the English Department, and painful as it is to say, repelled by the values he saw it as embracing. He said it was "ruled at the top by five or six Mandarins, while the work of the place was done by the slave labor below." The Cincinnati Reds baseball team won its second straight World Series during Phil's stay; and Phil thought the Art Museum reflected the town's values in that it collected valuable "things" instead of dedicating itself to the glories of the human spirit. These two ideas came together at one of his Elliston lectures, when he declared, infamously to many, "You get the baseball team you can afford, and the art museum you deserve." Phil's digs at the Vernon Manor were no picnic, either. This was right before that grand personage underwent a sweeping, and successful, renovation, and had become, in effect, a rather sad old-age home. Phil used to keep us in stitches about the sounds he heard on the other side of the wall each night, as yet another patron gave up the ghost. He swore people were dying every night there, and it's true I did see a hearse once waiting patiently in the circular drive. But mostly, as I've indicated, the ten weeks went back too quickly and most enjoyably. One of my sweetest memories is of the poet John Ficociello inviting us to dinner, then torturing us with the slowest making of homemade fettucine noodles in modern history. The martinis were strong, the talk was great, and the food was attacked when it finally showed up. I remember we were talking about movies, and Phil was trying to get across how his generation had been formed by them. I said I knew what he meant, and quoted Fred Astaire in TOP HAT, singing, "Putting on my top hat, polishing my nails!" I knew I was being perverse, as did Fic. And of course Phil, ever the tough guy, looked aghast. "I meant Jimmy Cagney," he said.

Before he left, Phil wanted to give us a gift, so he flew us to Detroit, to see the neighborhoods of his youth and get a better understanding of that powerhouse of a city. We stayed in Royal Oak, near Eddie's house. Eddie still ran the car parts business Phil had worked in, too, along with Lemon and the other men, whom we were able to meet. What can I say? I loved Eddie, too. Can you imagine two Phil Levines? One was already improbable to me. And meeting Lemon was, apart from meeting that dignified and wise presence himself, was a bit of history, to Maureen and me. Next day the poet and lawyer, Larry Joseph, who was then attached to the Michigan State Attorney General's office, and who'd published at least one book of poems, drove Phil, Maureen, and I around Detroit. We started at 8:00 AM and finished after 5:00, with Larry, an impassioned Detroit lover, giving us an incredible history lesson as we drove. We went to all Phil's old neighborhoods, the Ford Rouge plant, old houses, old businesses, old haunts. Phil rode shotgun and looked shell-shocked, but for us it was amazing, absolutely unforgettable. Larry, a brilliant poet and a brilliant lawyer, was also a brilliant historian and tour guide. Still, the most amazing moment was yet to come. Toward the end of the day, we stopped at a particular white house; I don't know if Phil directed Larry to stop, or if Larry knew to. Anyway, Phil told a story so startling to me that I've never forgotten it. Phil said he had had a short career as a second-story man--he'd once been a thief in the night! He said he'd got caught one night on a stair landing--or maybe he'd "caught" himself doing this, and realized how stupid it was, and stopped. And maybe, of course, he only did it that one time; or maybe even he was telling a story about how he THOUGHT about doing it, and never actually followed through. Who knows. But what a story.

The next day we went out to the race track where Eddie had a part-ownership of a horse, and spent the day watching the races and hanging out with the jockeys. Eddie, not surprisingly, is an accomplished painter, who uses a formal, elegiac approach to pop subject matter, mostly beer cans and jockeys. What a duo they were. That night we went to a club to see Kenny Burrell, the great jazz guitarist, and a childhood friend of Phil's and Eddie's. The wonderfully acerbic critic Wilfred Sheed once said, of the Midwest:
"Why hulking agglomerates like Cincinnati and Detroit never developed their own culture is beyond me." Phil Levine could never get his head around Cincinnati--and I've never been able to, either, completely--but for ten weeks in the fall of 1976, that was okay.

ELLISTON POET-IN-RESIDENCE, R.I.P.: A NEW ORLEANS JAZZ FUNERAL [by Jim Cummins]

Thanks so much to BAP for inviting me back to post for a week. I warned Stacey to be ready for a nostalgia bath: it's the end of the year and I thought I'd write about the end of an era. The Elliston Poet-in-Residence, a staple on the poetry landscape for exactly 60 years, is no more. As Thomas Kuhn, also a Cincinnatian, might put it, the New Paradigm--re, the current junior faculty, in this instance of the NP--has taken over. They've found a better way to spend the money; but that's another, and downer, story. I'd like to give the residency more of a New Orleans send-off, and reminisce about my involvement in the parade of glorious poets (and their glorious poems) who've graced Cincinnati since I arrived in October of 1975. Since I'm an Old Paradigm myself--unbelievably, I turned 64 when I wasn't looking--I ask your indulgence in letting me tell these stories. I'm not namedropping. To paraphrase Whitman, "I am the Gofer; I was there." I just didn't suffer that much.

The Elliston residency began as one part of a larger poetry program established in 1951, five years after Ms. George Elliston, a local newspaper reporter, poet, and supporter of all the arts, left a huge-for-the-times endowment to the University of Cincinnati for "the study of poetry." The first Elliston Poet was supposed to be T. S. Eliot, who canceled his commitment a week before he was scheduled to arrive. Fortunately, the redoubtable R. P. Tristram Coffin, a Maine poet, was available to step into the breach, and become, ahem, our Maine man. The roster of EP's for that first decade--and really, throughout all six decades--reads like a Who's Who of American and British poetry: John Berryman, Robert Frost, Randall Jarrell, Stephen Spender, Robert Lowell, et al. The EP lived here for ten weeks, during which he (alas, always "he" until the first woman, Denise Levertov, in 1973) taught a class, gave seven lectures and a poetry reading, and according to the biographies of several poets, as well as numerous eyewitnesses now mostly dead, consumed an enormous amount of alcohol. All this for the princely sum of $3000, a big haul for the times. Robert Lowell had a terrible breakdown here, as detailed in Ian Hamilton's biography, which was compounded by locals who tried to "defend" Lowell from his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and his doctors. Randall Jarrell charmed the entire city; Donald Justice delivered seven amazing scholarly lectures (soon to be available in digitized format, as will most of the tapes in the Elliston audio archive); Phil Levine fell in love; Marge Piercy's cats destroyed an apartment; and on his first day John Ashbery discovered our local Empress Chili AND our department head, an abrupt woman who wore jodphurs and riding boots to work, and carried a crop. And almost all the poets stayed, over the years, in the Vernon Manor, a grand old beast of a hotel, which still, until its makeover in the late '70s, maintained a wall of old signed photos of all the "stars" who'd stayed there. My favorites were a picture of the Beatles and one of Danny Thomas.

But to begin. It was spring of 1976, and I'd been curator for some months. I was standing in the old Elliston Room in Blegen Library--yes, that Carl Blegen--staring out the back window at a magnolia tree that was in its three-week bloom. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, warm and full of airborne pathogens. A presence--that's the only way I can describe it--suddenly filled the room. Though I hadn't remotely been thinking of him, and though I had no idea when he was arriving in Cincinnati for his ten-week residency--and certainly entertained no thought of his stopping by the room before he made his presence known to the English Department--I knew in that moment with absolute clarity that when I turned around, I would greet Gary Snyder. And when I did turn around, there he was, smiling, sun-soaked and bearded and beaded, in all his there-ness: part American Indian, part Kyoto monk, part mountain man, part Beat, part myth. Probably, if you need a scientific explanation, perhaps I heard the scuff of a moccasin, and leapt ahead to the visitor I knew was coming. But I'll tell you, it didn't FEEL like that, not at all. It felt like what it was, and is: people are larger presences than their bodies.

Anyway, thus began a great ten weeks, watching GS's openness to experiencing this part of the country, this city, us. I remember tonight a comment Snyder made a few years ago in an interview about his involvement in local politics--something along the lines of, "If you're going to get involved in changing things, you have to learn how to wait." I witnessed his ability "to wait," while he was here, and what that allows you to take in. Unfortunately, Gary's son, Kai, suffered from asthma, and when he got into our humid fecund place--Snyder had remarked, looking at the landscape from the plane, how he'd "forgotten how lush the country was, east of the Mississippi"--Kai had a terrible attack and had to be hospitalized. I remember speaking on the phone to the chair of the department, John McCall, a Chaucer scholar, and telling him the Snyders had no health insurance, and that the Elliston should pay for Kai's hospitalization. McCall said to have the bill sent directly to him, which it was; and no one heard any more of it. An example of the good side of the patriarchy, if you will. More tomorrow.

Jim Cummins, Guest Blogger November 26-December 7

This week we welcome back Jim Cummins, as our guest blogger. Jim is the author of Still Some Cake (Carnegie Mellon, 2012) The Whole Truth, (North Point Press, 1986),  Portrait in a Spoon, (University of South Carolina Press,1997), Then & Now, (Ohio University Press, 2004). He is co-author, with David Lehman, of Jim & Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2005). Jim's poems have been selected for The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 1995, 1998, 2005 and 2009, The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), and 180 More, edited by Billy Collins. Cummins has been curator of the Elliston Poetry Collection at the University of Cincinnati since 1975, where he is also Professor of English. Read his BAP blog posts here.  Jim's poem "Reading Hemingway" was recently featured on The Writer's Almanac.  You can listen to it here.

 Welcome back, Jim.

In other news . . .

John Ashbery to read at the New School: Saturday, December 8, 7 PM.  Details here.

Our Year in Review continues.  We're posting selections from each of this year's guest bloggers.  We're sure you will be inspired to look for more work by our contributors and to buy their books as holiday gifts.   And you can read posts by all of our guest bloggers, from the blog's beginning to the present, here. You will find remarkable work.

-- sdh

Four years ago today, Lehman took a tumble. . .

Lehman Is Shutting Loan Unit

“Lehman Is Shutting Loan Unit”
I was leafing through the Times, heading
for the sports page because I’ve become
a bit of a Yankee fan though I live in
Cincinnati, and even in Cincinnati I’m
aware of the chaos in the housing industry,
but all the exigencies and catastrophes had
eluded me until there, eye-poppingly, I read
“Lehman Is Shutting Loan Unit”!
Oh I’ve acted perfectly disgraceful when
it comes to amortization, and the date
due remains for me an approximation but
I’ve never actually defaulted on anything,
and I’m making progress, I’ve learned
debentures aren’t false teeth, oh I can’t
imagine closing an entire unit of loaning!
Lehman, we love you, keep forking over!

-- Jim Cummins

''Nell, In Her Villa" [by James Cummins]

They flee from me who sometime still had sought me;
I was for sale, and everybody bought me.
When I was young, you never could’ve caught me.

You lusted for some fancy; then you got me.
I didn’t have the heart to say it’s not me.
They flee from me who sometime still had sought me …

You were dismayed.  You’d thought I was a hot me.
Maybe you no longer knew how to slot me.
When I was young, you never could’ve caught me.

No, it’s a little bit you, but a lot me.
I’m sad I don’t match up to what you thought me.
They flee from me who sometime still had sought me.

Now I’m imprisoned by the wealth Time’s brought me.
I’m the palimpsest over which you jot me.
They flee from me who one time still had sought me.
When I was young, you never could’ve caught me.

  -- James Cummins

"Urban Sonnet" [by Jim Cummins]

When I consider how my light is spent,
I must consider how to pay the rent;
and if I compare thee to a summer's day,
I have to remember to pick up my pay
from Doll at the Not Marble Nor Gilded
Monument Bar & Grille, where I'm gelded
daily in speculations soured by sun;
I have no water, but I could use a gun.
A sudden blow, the thug's sap beating still—
walking to my second job, at Mabel's,
I'm jumped by punks under the burned-out light—
this goddamn neighborhood has gone downhill!
They also serve who only wait tables;
Baby, I'll be … your server to-niii-ii-ight.

-- Jim Cummins.

Note: I dared Jim to write an on-the-spot poem for insant posting and he obliged with the above on condition that I write and post my impromptu effort, so that will follow shortly. -- DL

". . . and turning for home it was Secretariat" by James Cummins and David Lehman

I was supposed to meet Monica, my secretary, at
Three o’clock: where was she? I felt like a ruffian,
Standing in the infield, watching the wind whirl away
Lost tickets. A policeman approached. A citation
Of some sort? No, he tipped his cap. “Sir Barton?”
He inquired, most respectfully. Yes, I affirmed—

What is it? “Just routine,” the cop affirmed.
I felt like a low-ranking diplomat at the UN Secretariat
Accused of spying for Belgium. Would the real Sir Barton
Avoid his inquisitor’s eyes as I did? No ruffian,
He, but a master of codes, ciphers, and encrypted citations
In fortune cookies. (“Autumn comes, goes, and whirls away.”)

I cleared my head … That world was world’s away
From this one. The policeman’s handshake was a firm,
Live thing. He pulled an envelope from his book of citations,
Then blushed. “Sir, I—I spoke with your secretary at—”
Scrawled across pink flowers, in Monica’s ruffian
Hand, was what the young man pointed to: ‘Sir Barton.’

“Huh,” I said thoughtfully. What was Monica doing at Sir Barton,
My estate, where I go to get away from the social whirl? Away—
I needed to whirl away. Having no choice but to play the ruffian,
I slugged the cop and ran. My masculinity thus affirmed,
I felt good. But there was still the question of my secretary. At
A loss I looked up her name in the index. Two citations

For cigar smuggling. Wait, what’s this? A third citation—
A monograph! Horrified, I read: “The Life and Times of Sir Barton”!
The scamp! The exploiter! Hastily, I cell-phoned the Secretariat.
“Adlai!” I shouted, “Adlai!”—but I watched my words whirl away,
As I realized, with a shock, Adlai was dead. I was alone, a firm-
Ament of pain my sole sky. I was, at last, one of the roughs. “Ian!”

I said, catching sight of James Bond’s creator. In the rough and
Tumble of life, the man stood erect, in an obvious state of excitation.
What the cop had intimated about Monica was true, he affirmed.
Indeed he had just spent a delightful day with her at Sir Barton.
All of them were in on the plot. It was, well, an LA way
Of doing business.Everything was for sale, even the name “Secretariat.”

After his recitation of the specials—including orange roughy and
Pepsi—the waiter whirled away.Sir Barton sighed.The rather, ah, firm
Haunches of the lad reminded him of that great warrior, Secretariat.

(from Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man by James Cummins and David Lehman.  Illustrations by Archie Rand.  Soft Scull Press, 2005)