My mother writes from Trenton,
a comedian to the bone
but underneath serious
and all heart. “Honey,” she says,
“be a mensch and Mary too,
its no good, to worry, you
are doing the best you can
your Dad and everyone
thinks you turned out very well
as long as you pay your bills
nobody can say a word
you can tell them, to drop dead
so save a dollar it can’t
hurt—remember Frank you went
to high school with? he still lives
with his wife’s mother, his wife
works while he writes his books and
did he ever sell a one
the four kids run around naked
36, and he’s never had,
you’ll forgive my expression
even a pot to piss in
or a window to throw it,
such a smart boy he couldnt
read the footprints on the wall
honey you think you know all
the answers you dont, please, try
to put some money away
believe me it wouldn’t hurt
artist schmartist life’s too short,
for that kind of, forgive me,
horseshit, I know what you want
better than you, all that counts
is to make a good living
and the best of everything,
as Sholem Aleichem said,
he was a great writer did
you ever read his books dear,
you should make what he makes a year
anyway he says some place
Poverty is no disgrace
but its no honor either
that’s what I say,
love,
Mother”

Leaving the pond, she looks like something I know,
hauled-up and dripping, glistening in the sunlight,
and swinging her heavy auburn hair she comes to the blanket.

Her eyes are on the trees of the horizon.
I stare at her shoulder and arm,
flushed, and palely freckled, and moist, and cold to the touch.

Behind the pines and cedars the sun is falling,
casting their shadows deep on the empty beach
and the cold red water, suddenly unfamiliar.

In a few minutes, she will undress and sit
alone on the gritty bench of the bathhouse in semidark,
slowly wiping her breasts with a damp towel.

~~~~~

HARDY*
By Robert Mezey

Thrown away at birth, he was recovered,
Plucked from the swaddling-shroud, and chafed and slapped,
The crone implacable. At last he shivered,
Drew the first breath, and howled, and lay there, trapped
In a world from which there is but one escape
And that forestalled now almost ninety years.
In such a scene as he himself might shape,
The maker of a thousand songs appears.

From this it follows, all the ironies
Life plays on one whose fat it is to follow
The way of things, the suffering one sees,
The many cups of bitterness he must swallow
Before he is permitted to be gone
Where he was headed in that early dawn.

* According to Thomas Hardy’s biographer, Martin Seymour-Smith,
“At eight o’clock in the morning, on Tuesday, 2 June 1840, the infant
Hardy was cast aside as dead by the doctor who delivered him. ‘Had it
not been for the common sense of the estimable woman who attended
as monthly nurse,’ he said, writing of himself in the third person some
eighty years later, ‘he might never have waled the earth.’ ”
Hardy: A Biography (p. 1).

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Was literary, evidently,
But his chief claim to fame
Is his middle name.

~~~~~

Johann Sebastian Bach
At 2 a.m. sighed, “Ach,
Bring me some coffee, I gotta
Finish a cantata.”

~~~~~

Edgar Allen Poe
I would rank very low;
I simply cannot bear
His dank tarns and hyacinth hair.

~~~~~

Charles Bukowski
Could never find his housekey,
But being a total souse,
He was lucky just to find his house.

~~~~~

William Butler Yeats
Was one of the near-greats;
IF he hasn’t dined with Landor and that bunch,
He has at least had lunch.

~~~~~

George Herbert, John Donne—
You could pick either one.
And what about Sir Philip Sydney?
He wrote some good poems, didney?