March 2024
Bio Note: As a freelancer, I’ve written histories, literary spoofs, pulp novels, and memoirs for a Green Beret and an NFL quarterback. As an academic (Ph.D. in folklore), I’ve done three scholarly anthologies and essays on yellow ribbons, “That’s Amore,” the term gringo, and the tooth fairy. I perform as a singer-songwriter on my Skip Yarrow website and You Tube. After returning in my 70s to an early passion, poetry, I am now aspiring to write something to which W.H. Auden might respond without wincing.
A Brief History of Troglodytes
Through the long Pleistocene, when days and stars
lacked names and our ancestors slept in caves,
cats with scimitar fangs patrolled the dark,
their lumbering shadows haunting the mouths
of shelters where families huddled at fires,
chipping at stones, painting beasts on the walls,
inventing religion.
Fifty millennia on, the indoor climate steady
at seventy-two, we trust to cameras and dead bolts,
shotguns and godly behavior. Tooth and claw are
memories, mostly, now. And yet I awaken still
in the pre-dawn gloom, wondering if that distant
whine is a passing train or exuberant coyotes
closing on prey.
Writ in Water
Just after Labor Day, 1958, when the Everly Brothers’
“Bird Dog” was topping the charts and the rebellion
against Batista was nearing its end, I was studying Latin
in a New Jersey high school named, like many others,
for Teddy Roosevelt. Our teacher, a stocky matron nearing
retirement, wore her grey hair tucked up with pins
and slouchy sweaters and the cotton anklets favored
by Sinatra fans. With the casual cruelty of the young
we called her “Bobby Socks Hearn.”
One day she shared her memories of a trip to Rome
she’d taken in the silvery years between the wars.
Did she show us slides or postcards? I don’t remember.
What I do remember is that, after dutiful stops
at the Forum and the Colosseum, she made her way
to John Keats’s graveside to read the words
he had ordered cut in stone. No name, no dates, just
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
We were a carefree clutch of fourteen-year olds.
What could we make of this ancient woman
whispering those ten syllables, then weeping
as if she had lost a mother or a child?
The plain sad truth is nothing at all.
Stifling guilty sniggers we stared
at our desks, twenty dewy faces oblivious
of oblivion and of the dumb ache brought on
by scouring time, be you an old woman
in socks or a prince of players.
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