Classic Poem

How
Unstable the collapsible cardboard card table,
And out of doors, too, though
Snow
Comes cascading flakemeal down
As though from the inner surface
Of a big grey Easter egg,
Flamboyant carloads of oyster crackers
Which, laid end to six-sided quixotic end,
Would reach, they say, to the vellum moon.

Hers is a folding chair
From a defunct funeral parlor,
Its very undertaker himself long takenunder;
Hers is a folding table
From a folded — that is, bankrupt — bridge parlor
Where pre-Socratic philosophers were wont
To bid nothing but one no trump,
Bickering about it.

And the nineteenth-century pencil she sucks
And samples in meditation
Utters its obsolete message of or pertaining to
The combined wisdom of cheapness
Of insurance
Purchased from or through a certain agency
In the city of — in the state of — —
Whose motto is almost Montana's, oro y plata .
The hardest part for her is the octave
Rhyming abbaabba , a and b
Sufficiently differentiated — as
Masculine versus feminine, front
Back, unvoiced voiced — as
Though to permit further foliations
In the Mediterranean of the cdecde of the sestet.

We blue-eyed white men of the North (long nursed
On Lutheran nonsense and racial vanity,
Detesting you darker branches of humanity
With atavistic hatred, for, from the first,
Widow-making winters dealt us the worst
The world could deal, making kaput our sanity
In a bland landscape of blue-white inanity
Aglow with Gotterdämmerung) are cursed.
Self-sentenced to extinction, we watch you
Adopt an older, darker eidolon
And claim your proper station, where you will make
The same mistakes we made, until, on cue,
Those you abuse will break free — on and on,
Mistake breeding mistake breeding mistake.