Short Poems

Thick-fleeced bushes like a heifer's ear.
Out-fleeced spaniel's

On one who borrowed his sermons

Herclots's preachings I'll no longer hear:
They're out of date — lent sermons all the year.

On a Poetess

Miss M.'s a nightingale. 'Tis well
Your simile I keep.
It is the way with Philomel
To sing while others sleep.

By one of the old school who was bid to follow Mr. Browning's flights

To rise you bid me with the lark
With me 'tis rising in the dark.

Modern Poets

Our swans are now of such remorseless quill,
Themselves live singing and their hearers kill.

On a dunce who had not a word to say for himself

He's all that's bad, I know; a knave, a flat,
But his effrontery's not come to that.

Angel of beach houses and picnics, do you know solitaire?
Fifty-two reds and blacks and only myself to blame.

Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen
with cheese and bread and rose on the rocks of Rockport.

She of the rolls that floated in the air, she of the inlaid
woodwork all greasy with lemon, she of the feather and dust,

Oh Angel of the blizzard and blackout, Madam white face,
take me back to that red mouth, that July 21st place.

Angel of hope and calendars, do you know despair?
That hole I crawl into with a box of Kleenex,

In this hole your baby is strangling. Your mouth is clay.
Your eyes are made of glass. They break. You are not brave.

You are as still as a yardstick. You have a doll's kiss.
The brain whirls in a fit. The brain is not evident.
I have gone to that same place without a germ or a stroke.
A little solo act--that lady with the brain that broke.

. . . What unusual luck! My body
passively resisting. Part of the leftovers. Part of the kill.