Paul Muldoon

Sideman

I’ll be the Road Runner

To your Wile E Coyote

I’ll take you in my stride

I’ll be a Sancho Panza

To your Don Quixote

Your ever faithful guide

I’ll stand by you in the lists

With our market strategists

I’ll be your sideman, baby,

I’ll be by your side

I’ll be a Keith Richards

To your Mick Jagger

Before he let things slide

I’ll be Sears to your Roebuck

Before he took the headstaggers

And opened nationwide

I'll support you at Wembley

I may require some assembly

But I'll be your sideman, baby,

I'll be by your side

I’ll be McCartney to your Lennon

Lenin to your Marx

Jerry to your Ben &

Lewis to your Clark

Burke to your Hare

James Bond to your Q

Booboo to your Yogi Bear

Tigger to your Pooh

Trigger to your Roy Rogers

Roy to your Siegfried

Fagin to your Artful Dodger

I guess I’ll let you take the lead

(guitar solo)

I’ll be a Chingachgook

To your Leatherstocking

A blaze of fur and hide

Our shares consolidated

Our directorates interlocking

I’ll be along for the ride

I’ll be at Ticonderoga

I’ll be there for you at yoga

I’ll be your sideman, baby,

I’ll be by your side

John Fuller

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 Canicule Macaronique

Heureux ceux qui ont la clim—Corse-Matin (6.8.94)

Heureux ceux qui ont la clim

Pendant la grande canicule.

Heureux those whose culs are cool.   

Heureuse her and heureux him.

C’est la canicule qui hurle,

Ready to tear you limb from limb.   

Heureux ceux qui ont la clim,   

Cri-criant: ‘O turlútuturle!’

La situation est grim,

The mise-en-scène a trifle burle.

À chaleur disons donc: ‘Ta gueule!’

And keep ourselves amused and slim.

Heureux qui par terre se roule:   

Lucky Luke and Lucky Jim,   

Edith Piaf, Tiger Tim,

Et le plus divin Poupoule.

Heureux Toccate, heureux Hymne,   

Heureux Mouvements Perpetuels,   

Heureuses Les Bîches immortelles,   

De tristesse sexuelle synonyme.

Je ne regrette rien. I’m full

Of love as are the seraphim,

And plein de bonheur to the brim,   

Pendant cette grande canicule.

La vie has satisfying sym:

For every lui there lives an elle.   

Finding its level in her well,

La source sauvage is in the swim.

Ni ouragan ni canicule,

Ni pretexte prompte ou assez flim,   

Can keep le coeur from feeling imm,   

Allègre in the planet’s pull.

Let’s fly together in a bim,

Au-dessus de la fou-foule

Qui mange ses menus et ses moules,   

Impregné de sueur, et prim!

For always I’ll have you, and you’ll   

Have me, and though desire grows dim,   

Heureux ceux qui ont la quim,

Heureuses celles qui ont le tool.

Forever through the sky will skim   

Le pé-pédalo de Dédale,

Escaladant sans escale

The blue horizon’s endless rim.

En pénitence, le tournesol   

Beguiné, poudreuz, anonyme,   

Turns and turns, and at a whim   

Sonne, en sol, son son du sol.

From Chatellerault to Arles and Nîmes   

Le visage bronze du tournesol   

S’incline comme un pa-parasol   

Trouve une épaule coquette, intime.

Devisé dans le banderole:

‘Heureux ceux qui ont la clim.’

Across the fields the notes are dim:   

Son sol, son sol, son sol, son sol.

Jack Gilbert

Highlights and Interstices

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

Jack Gilbert

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Jack Gilbert

with Gerald Stern, San Francisco (1950)

The Great Fires

Love is apart from all things. 
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it. 
It is not the body that finds love. 
What leads us there is the body. 
What is not love provokes it. 
What is not love quenches it. 
Love lays hold of everything we know. 
The passions which are called love 
also change everything to a newness 
at first. Passion is clearly the path 
but does not bring us to love. 
It opens the castle of our spirit 
so that we might find the love which is 
a mystery hidden there. 
Love is one of many great fires. 
Passion is a fire made of many woods, 
each of which gives off its special odor 
so we can know the many kinds 
that are not love. Passion is the paper 
and twigs that kindle the flames 
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes 
because it tries to be love. 
Love is eaten away by appetite. 
Love does not last, but it is different 
from the passions that do not last. 
Love lasts by not lasting. 
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire 
for his sins. Love allows us to walk 
in the sweet music of our particular heart.

Mina Loy

 Joyce's Ulysses

The Normal Monster

sings in the Green Sahara

 

The voice and offal

of the image of God

 

make Celtic noises

in these lyrical hells

 

Hurricanes

of reasoned musics

reap the uncensored earth

 

Barbara Guest

 Non Est . . .

Nothing more to say, Catullus,
            you have walked away

                                   from the green room
                                      "       "     dark room
You have turned your head
                                   from the clam beds

                                            Catullus!

You must be hiding!

                                   I do not know the address
                                   of your villa
I do not know the fiddlers, the caterers
                                   or those space girls
who sang of those women
(now they’re wringing their hands)

I am a visitor who reads magazines
                                   in one language

James Tate

I

In the Grolier Bookshop, Harvard Square (1965)

Entries

When I think no thing is like any other thing 
I become speechless, cold, my body turns silver 
and water runs off me. There I am 
ten feet from myself, possessor of nothing, 
uncomprehending of even the simplest particle of dust. 
But when I say, You are like 
a swamp animal during an eclipse, 
I am happy, full of wisdom, loved by children 
and old men alike. I am sorry if this confuses you. 
During an eclipse the swamp animal 
acts as though day were night, 
drinking when he should be sleeping, etc. 
This is why men stay up all night 
writing to you. 

Barbara Guest

Heavy Violets

Heavy violets there is no way

if the door clicks the cushion
makes murmur noise and the woman
on the sofa turns half in half out
a tooth slipping from velvet. 

The world makes this division
copied by words each with a leaf
attached to images it makes of this
half in air and half out
like haloes or wrists

That separate while they spin
airs or shadows if you wish,
once or twice half in half out
a real twirl jostles there
lips creased with violets you wish.

James Tate

 

"The List of Famous Hats"

Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all hon- esty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The first one isn't even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up--well, he didn't really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pin- head at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that be- neath his public head there was another head and it was a pyra- mid or something. 

James Tate

 POEM TO SOME OF MY RECENT POEMS

My beloved little billiard balls,
my polite mongrels, edible patriotic plums,
you owe your beauty to your mother, who
resembled a cylindrical corned beef
with all the trimmings, may God rest
her forsaken soul, for it is all of us
she forsook; and I shall never forget
her sputtering embers, and then the little mound.
Yes, my little rum runners, she had defective
tear ducts and could weep only iced tea.
She had petticoats beneath her eyelids.
And in her last years she found ball bearings
in her beehive puddings, she swore allegiance
to Abyssinia. What should I have done?
I played the piano and scrambled eggs.
I had to navigate carefully around her brain’s
avalanche lest even a decent nale be forfeited.
And her beauty still evermore. You see,
as she was dying, I led each of you to her side,
one by one she scorched you with her radiance.
And she is ever with us in our acetylene leisure.
But you are beautiful, and I, a slave to a heap of cinders.

Wanda Coleman

from.  Greatest Hits 1966–2003. Pudding House Press (2004)

Eager to make my mark on the literary landscape, I got busy finding the mentors who would teach me in lieu of the college education I could not afford. As a result, I have developed a style composed of styles sometimes waxing traditional, harking to the neoformalists, but most of my poems are written in a sometimes frenetic, sometimes lyrical free verse, dotted with literary, musical, and cinematic allusions, accented with smatterings of German, Latin, Spanish, and Yiddish, and neologisms, and rife with various cants and jargons, as they capture my interest, from the corporate roundtables to the streets.