Poetics and Ruminations

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

 

R.I.P. ANDREW MARVELL

March 31, 1621 – August 16, 1678)

 

He had not world enough, nor time,

For coyness, but enough for rime

To spin its web and develop larval

Verse forms to make Andrew Marvell.

Hornpipe Epithalamium

 

 

Back in the early '50s Jack Golab had his jewelry store on West Main Street in Meriden, Connecticut, just a few doors up from the Palace Theater and across the street from the establishment owned by the father of my friend Paul, Wiese’s Butter and Egg Shop. Not far above Wiese’s there was a record emporium where I bought my LP records, and between them there was, and still is, the silver diner where I learned to love English muffins with bacon and eggs over easy. So this was a hub of my high school life, and that may be why I patronized Golab’s Jewelers exclusively.

I gave Jack a fair amount of business. I worked downtown after school and on weekends at Kresge’s Five and Dime where I was a busboy making, at first, forty-five cents an hour, and later on ten cents more. With the overtime Kresge’s paid me under the table (as a schoolboy I wasn’t supposed to work more than — I think it was twenty hours a week), I had enough to carry on a rather heavy dating schedule with the maidens of Meriden High to whom I tended to give, as my token of undying love, an ankle bracelet with her name (and perhaps mine) engraved on it.

But then came the days after high school when I went to sea and left behind my true love, Jean Houdlette, daughter of my seventh-grade shop teacher. When the time came, of course, I had to upgrade somewhat from an ankle bracelet, so I went to Jack Golab’s and asked to buy the best ring in the store that a sailor could afford.

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read Hornpipe Epithalamion

The sea blows high and the wind blows cold,

         The Hornet sails out to sting.

We bellbottom boys are bully and bold,

Young at the moment but growing old,

And it's no damn good that I bought Jean a ring,

         I bought pretty Jean a ring.

 

The Gunner's Apprentice is cute as a pin,

         The Yeoman can really swing.

Those almond-eyed girls all know how to sin

To make your eyes swivel and your head spin —

But I had to go buy Jeanie a ring,

         A yellowish diamond ring.

 

Davy Jones flirts with the mermaids below.

         Down there where Neptune is king

The seacows come swimming along in a row

With nothing more on than a green weed bow

While the drowned sailors gather around in a ring

         And dance till the fathoms ring,

 

For each wooed a maiden of iron and steel,

         Then took her out for a fling.

She had a pert hull and a lovely keel,

But one day she just wouldn't answer her wheel —

I wonder if Jeanie's still wearing her ring,

         That beautiful bargain ring.

 

The wind blows cold, the sea blows high;

         I stand here trying to sing,

But the salt spray rises to spit in my eye

Till I'm ready to kill and fit to die

While Jeanie sits home and stares at her ring,

         For I gave sweet Jean my ring.

   

The poem was published originally in Song, 5, 1978, originally collected in First Poems by Lewis Turco, 1960, and then in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages, © 2004, all rights reserved. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM; the poem and essay appeared in La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON.

 

 
 

 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Friday, March 26th, 2010

 

R.I.P. A. E. HOUSMAN  

March 26, 1859 - April 30, 1936

 

He wasn’t good, he wasn’t bad,

He was simply always sad,

This Shropshire lad who wore a caftan

Woven of shadow, Alfred Housman.

 

Published originally in Per Contra Spring 2009 Light Verse Supplement at www.percontra.net/14lightverseentry.htm.

 

 
 

R.I.P. ROBERT FROST

March 26, l874-January 29, 1963

 

Death is, of course, the Thief of Time,

Not to mention an end to rime

Which we discovered to our cost

When we were robbed of Robert Frost.

 

Published originally in Per Contra Spring 2009 Light Verse Supplement at www.percontra.net/14lightverseentry.htm

 

 
 

R.I.P. GREGORY CORSO

March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001

 

He signed the flyleaf of a tome,

“Chow! Chai!” — in every pome

Much of the same, and even moreso

Runs the legacy of Gregory Corso.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

 

R.I.P. LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

March 24, 1919 –

 

Here lies Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Wrapped in crepes, not in spaghetti

Because he was — by fatal chance —

Not bred in Yonkers but in France. 

Uncle Wesli’s New Mother Goose No. 6

 

HAPPY HARRY

 

Happy Harry Hooligan,

Acting like a fool again,

         Kissed a frog

         That sat on a log

And jumped into the pool again.

 

Originally published in Light Year '84, edited by Robert Wallace, Cleveland. OH: Bits Press, 1983. All rights reserved 2010 by Wesli Court.

Here’s to Your Health!

 

  

When I was a senior at Meriden High School, Meriden, Connecticut, back in the early ‘fifties, it was my belief that every citizen of the United States had the right to decent health care. When I graduated from high school in 1952 and joined the Navy in order to qualify for the G. I. Bill, I discovered that only members of the military, and other government agencies, had access to comprehensive and affordable health care.

Fifty-eight years later, during which most of the rest of the Western world has instituted national health care systems, including our neighbor to the North, Canada, America has at last been decent enough to enact health care for all its citizens. Now that we have joined the civilized world at last, I wish to offer this toast to us all:

 

HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH AMERICA, AT LAST!

Lewis Putnam Turco

Damming The River Of Time

By Robert Chute

 

In this issue of The New York Review

a picture of the Ku Klux Klan parading,

September, Nineteen  Twenty-six, filling

the avenue, capital dome for background,

lots of American flags were fluttering.

I was seven months old so don’t blame me.

 

Yesterday, March 22, Two Thousand-ten,

at the capital protesting the health reform bill,

men shouted “nigger” at a black congressman

and spat on another. Someone it seems

has dammed up the river of time again.

 

It’s harder to recognize the Klan in jeans

or leisure suits. The heart of their protest may

still be the color of their president’s skin.

 

 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Sunday, March 21st, 2010

 

R.I.P. PHYLLIS MCGINLEY

March 21, 1905 – February 22, 1978

 

The comic poet Phyllis McGinley

Climbed Mount Parnassus, not McKinley.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Saturday, March 20th, 2010

 

R.I.P. ANNE BRADSTREET

March 20, 1612-September 16, 1672

 

She hadn’t meant to be a poet,

None of her friends, though, seemed to know it:

They published her doodles from the Fleet,

Creating the new bard Anne Bradstreet.

The Forest of My Seasons

A Sestina

Desire today is a cavern of snow;

   ice rimes all limbs with synonyms for wind.

      Yesternoon it was goat-time, time for horns

         rampant on a field vert under the woods

            quartered in a southern compass.  Toucan

               tones rose close beneath the surface of shade,

 

               threatening rupture.  Poet, draw your shade

today upon a mirror made of snow

            shadowed.  Men may hibernate if bears can.

   Desire must sleep in a cavern of wind

         till it may be harried awake by wood-

      pecker beak and Pan's sunsharp or ramshorns —

 

      Too many words, like girdles built of horn,

               confined in an attic.  How to say shade

         but make it mean more, as: tiles of the wood

laid for light to walk on; and to have snow

   imply more than God's linoleum.  Wind

            is wind, but direction matters.  Who can

 

            help me?  Where's my muse today?  Shake your can,

      you errant Echo, and get home.  My horns

   sprout long as the cuckoo's song while you wind

               your own clock and make love with your own shade

someplace up a cavern or down the snow

         where wild Narcissus buds among your woods.

 

         The forest of my seasons grows strange woods

            sometimes; this fall of words grows as it can,

not as it ought.  My pen is cold as snow:

      its ink runs like chilled honey from the horns

               of silence.  Lie you down, lie down in shade,

   word-warbler.  Sleep sound with your mistress wind.

 

   And while you sleep, dream.  Dream of the south wind

         needling you awake with slivers of woods:

               birch and pine, maple that sweetens in shade;

            oak on the white hillside.  Dream, if you can,

      of gray moles, brown mice, winter's hunting horns

blown to silence.  Dream no longer of snow,

 

for time and flesh shall do more than wind can

to blend your words with woodwinds and woodshorns.

There will be tonics.  It's time for shades now.

 

 

  

"The Forest of My Seasons" appeared originally in The Northwest Review, iv:3, 1961 and was gathered in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM

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Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Thursday, March 18th, 2010

 

R.I.P. WILFRED OWEN

March 18, 1893 – November 4, 1918

 

Here lies the poet Wilfred Owen

Who used the powers of his pen

To picture vividly the horror

That swallowed him in the First World War.

 

 
 

R.I.P. JOHN UPDIKE

March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009

 

His verse was often bright and funny

Unlike his prose which was not sunny

Except for Eastwick with its witches —

The movie kept the world in stitches.