November 2014
I’m a professor who lives, like a lot of other professors, near Boston. In addition to academic things, I write fiction when I’m up to it, poems when I can’t help it. I use a German fountain pen—my principal link to tradition—and write to music. I’ve published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, the story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play, two short novels, Losses and The Derangement of Jules Torquemal. My novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction. My most recent story collection, The Artist Wears Rough Clothing, was published this summer.
Author's note: My grandson asked me for a poem that would fit in his pocket...
Pocket Rap
Some poems just waltz,
While some really rock it.
Some poems are so bad
They belong on a docket.
A good one’s not cheap--
Though you can’t really hock it.
A rude poem’s so nasty
That you’d like to clock it.
A foolish thing is ripe
For a poem to mock it.
No poetry in Wal-Mart;
They simply don’t stock it.
Some poems are so short
They’d fit in a locket.
But this one was made to go
In Eli’s left side pocket.
Nostalgia of A Semi-Sober Man
Drunkenness is the glue fixing
his slack limbs to his trunk.
There are some precious few
moments he remembers.
The first time he got drunk,
he was mesmerized by embers
as they tangoed up the flue.
One crisp noon in September
he cleared the yard of junk,
old black tires below sky-blue.
On a frozen night in December
he limped laughing after her, sunk
through a crust of sparkling snow.
These things he remembers
even when he’s not drunk.
Things stuck with other glue.
Injunctions
|
Stop using i
or even I Eschew to be in any of its conjugal avatars Never say dark obscure umbral Refer to angels at your peril also periwinkles hogsheads hieratic scales freight-yard tares all sorts of penultimates Avoid comparing our planet to, say, a teardrop Cease humanizing gerbils and polecats Mention whale songs and I’ll promise to shriek But never refer to screams sighs cries |
yells howls
Give up Nipponese shorts such as: Like a fuse my words run down the page waiting to be lit by your eye Blow those clouds out of sight and cerulean lucid potlatch words like crystalline Don’t look so hard at moles and flattened possums Never moralize Drop the loose and ar bitrary lines all posturing Express, don’t revise to death Don’t rhyme at last we see with courtesy Just don’t |
Incerta Navigatio
You say you pray that we might stay
shipmates forever, come what may.
It’s hazardous to supplicate,
my dear, for some impending date.
Who knows, of all the ships at sea,
which one’s for you and which for me?
You might steam East, I could sail West.
Tuesday you might think parting best.
We all drift over an abyss;
nothing’s vouchsafed, not even this
stout ship christened The Here and Now;
it lacks a rudder, even a prow.
My dear, while we’re still safe ashore
in this dry room, behind that door,
let’s be agnostics and not pray
for an unsure night, a doubtful day.
©2014 Robert Wexelblatt