The Losing Candidates Will Now Say A Few Words

                      
                            I.

Innocence is what we’re always losing, 
like an actress who begins each film a 
virgin.  We’re supposed to be heedless of 
history, which is bunk, always starting 
afresh, devising new thingamajigs 
and new selves pretty much every morning. 
What they can’t resist about us, we’re told, 
isn’t just our can-do know-how but our 
wrinkle-free optimism, as though 
we’re toddlers and they’re doting, uncritical 
grandparents who have to bend to look on 
us, smiling as we master our expensive
toys.  Sometimes you can glimpse a flicker of
affection for our possibilities
under the scorn of our droll gaucherie,
resentment of our reckless squandering.

                            II.

The world preserves its wonders but not all.  
The Pope grumbles that we forestall devout 
Florentines and Venetians from praying 
in their art-encrusted churches, but it’s 
no wonder, even if pious Bolognese 
exist.  Who prays in a museum, we 
muse, and stroll up to the next Madonna, 
scrutinize the freshly scrubbed mosaics,
rather garish and not so holy now.
Best beacon when new-born, when poor in 
all but rhetoric, ideas, and acres, 
resented deeply yet imitated 
in our adolescent affluence; for 
the world’s young yearn to be our teenagers. 
We’re peaceable but ferocious when roused— 
don’t dare to tread on us—breezy, hellbent 
on Harleys, enormous children armed to 
their milk teeth, a proper provocation to 
the Old World’s untranslatable Schadenfreude.

                            III.
​
Goethe praised with envy
but didn’t emigrate;
Donne conceived a body
nude, ripe to copulate.

Millions in the lottery
and millions insecure;
Marx’s diagnosis
was better than his cure.

Virtue’s road is rocky
and hand-grenades get hurled;
intractable is the
nastiness of this world.

No doubt those rough Dutch sailors,
many centuries dead,
were awed by what they glimpsed
just like Fitzgerald said. 





Dinner Party

​
Sam and Gillian had Ivor and Jan over
for supper, seeing how they’d moved next door.
They were sitting around before dinner 
sipping sherry, cabernet, and scotch,
wolfing down Gillian’s clam dip, 
when all of a sudden Ivor said that if
all of a sudden there were a fire or
all of a sudden the air were sucked out or
all of a sudden somebody began shooting or
all of a sudden they were dying of thirst
then they wouldn’t give a shit about
each other.  On the contrary.  From this
Ivor deduced that all social life
is a lie and he, for one, would give
it up, if it weren’t for Jan here.

Flushing, Jan said Ivor had these fits, that
Sam and Gillian should just ignore him
and that the clam dip was super and could
she possibly have, you know, the recipe?

Gillian had been to college where she
majored in something and she replied,
looking instructively at Ivor, that it was
just a matter of the Hierarchy of Needs
or, if he preferred, the three kinds of
Aristotelian soul, only the last and
highest of which was human.  We
had to be fed first, aired, secured, 
but at heart we are political animals
made for the occasional coup d’état
and for suburban dinner parties.

Sam, the host, sat dourly sipping his scotch,
thinking about what vacuum could
suck the air out of his living room
and who might start the shooting first
and wondering what kind of name was
Ivor anyway when all of a sudden

Ivor leapt to his feet and began a
scatological philippic about the School
Committee which had voted to adopt a
textbook that didn’t blame the Indians,
that said slavery called the moral purity
of the Founding Fathers into doubt, not
to mention spattering various other blots
on the escutcheon of the greatest nation
in the history of the world, the only
one ever founded on a good idea, he
quoted, and then Ivor looked down at
red-faced Jan who had begun slowly weeping,
her head bent over the bowl of claim dip,
and who sobbed, “Oh, this always happens.”