Pinball at Cafe Pantheon

Market Forces sinned mortally in the 1920s*
when they boosted the timid patrician, Eliot,
at the expense of the bold physician, Williams.

Thus, America’s windshield is transformed
into a rear-view mirror, where objects never
are as they appear to the naked eye.

T. S. Eliot walked backwards through life –
contrary to the path of sun-worshipping civilisation,
he moved ever eastward, away from newborn

Missouri, and youthful New England, clear
across the sea to ancient Oxford, where non-
American subjects know their places.

A century later, we know that Mr. Eliot
lacked the sort of hands-on training
found readily due east of England.

Though dons and tutors are good for some,
for the lessons needed by young Tom,
the right professor was la madame.

Dave Read

*Eliot’s The Waste Land was published in 1922; William Carlos Williams published Spring and All in 1923.

Worn thin, thin as water,
is your terrible beauty, Butler Yeats.

Put down your pen and pick a tool
to raze schools of thought –

Where you are king, prints lead fools.
Pints of poets send pretend aristocrats

And approximate proletarians
down rabbit holes of silent scorn,

Pomp, and circumstance, ermine-robed
under bloody mortarboards.

Will Bogside hold tenured profs.,
tho neither man, nor nation, be -hooded?

Once idled shamrocks quake anew,
We darn yankees noodle O’Donnell Abu.

Dave Read

O’Donnell Abu lyrics courtesy of Wikipedia:

Proudly the note of the trumpet is sounding;
Loudly the war cries arise on the gale;
Fleetly the steed by Lough Swilly is bounding,
To join the thick squadrons on Saimear’s green vale.
On, ev’ry mountaineer,
Strangers to flight or fear,
Rush to the standard of dauntless Red Hugh.
Bonnaught and Gallowglass,
Throng from each mountain pass.
On for old Erin, “O’Donnell Abú!”

Sacred the cause that Clan Connell’s defending–
The altars we kneel at and homes of our sires;
Ruthless the ruin the foe is extending–
Midnight is red with the plunderer’s fires.
On with O’Donnell then,
Fight the old fight again,
Sons of Tirconnell,
All valiant and true:
Make the false Saxon feel
Erin’s avenging steel!
Strike for your country! “O’Donnell Abú!”

Emily Dickinson knew her’s to a T –
Walt Whitman’s was the same as our’s.

Good Edgar Allen Poe’s was bad, finally.

Dave Read

For David Giannini

Before snow on your grave,
your life work was on the market.

Yankee thrift, the force that drives
your generations.

Your spirit called in a chit, so
your friends bought the place –

Lock, stock, and barrell,
Ox Cart and Glenwood stove.

Your chapter cycles seasons amid
the dead calm of Mt. Kearsarge.

– Dave Read

I’m no scholar, but it seems to me
that Yeats has it wrong,
or at least upside down, when he
Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.

The sky’s not for walking, William Butler,
and “don’t tread on my dreams”
sounds too precious by half. But wait –
wouldn’t Maud Gunne stride instead?

Dreams that linger long enough
for metaphor lose their airiness –
they drop from gossamer to lead.

Dave Read

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

– William Butler Yeats

Dave Read

*CBS revoked its invitation for Bob Dylan to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in May, 1963, because Dylan wanted to play “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Thus allowed to gestate in the shadows, the John Birch Society morphed into today’s Republican Party. Remember kids, “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.”

Bob Dylan disclaims use of the Welsh poet’s name; we lifted from this Dylan Thomas title: A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Across Kansas

My family slept those level miles
but like a bell rung deep till dawn
I drove down an aisle of sound,
nothing real but in the bell,
past the town where I was born.

Once you cross a land like that
you own your face more; what the light
struck told a self, every rock
denied all the rest of the world.
We stopped at Sharon Springs and ate –

My state still dark, my dream to long to tell.

– William Stafford

honeyboy andrew meade read Prufrock
stem to stern, like a pilot reads wind –
Winds up seeing therein a post-rock
Sub-genre scene. So, he buys in

To test a thesis and see whether Eliot means
To display one rock upon another, until the racket
enriches the tone-deaf, then deals a black ace to
the knave in the nave, where plain folk sing mass.

Alternately, he allows it’s not unlikely that our good trans –
Atlantic man shows, merely, a cast of lynx in spanx.

Dave Read