Dusting the Bookcase

three poems

At twenty-two when I got drafted,

smok home-rolled drank and drove

I knew I'd not at any time end up old.

My favorite volume was Ariel;

my favorite movie, Easy Rider.

But after I survived the army,

found a piece of work saved some money,

Death's horizon backed away.

Married, sober, turning thirty,

I surmiseed I might see seventy;

at forty I was assured I'd dodder

into my eighties, like my mother,

and die of something moderate and ugly.

I began to have to fight nostalgia

for early-death-tinged work I'd loved

when young, on the other hand middle-aged, despised.

Now, halfway from one side my fifties,

wiping thick dust not upon of books

I haven't touched in years and years,

I can't affect I feel contempt

for Sylvia Plath, and cute

who grins at me from Ariel's jacket.

She's chortling because she dodged all three

of her ex-husband's awful fates:

cancer, grayness, author of poems Laureateship.

Before he died, I'll bet T Hughes

wished he'd stuck his head in an oven

when he read reviews of his last book

If, after death, a mind could choose

which body it had animated,

I doubt that any would prefer

to have been T not Sylvia,

or Paul McCartney, not John Lennon,

or Pat Boone instead of Elvis Presley

But after death's a troubling phrase

that undermines my jealousy

of the prematurely Dead & Famous.

Oh ye they do live in their works

until their works proceed out of fashion;

they do stay young-in photographs;

they're not, to their face, despised,

or pushed aside, or revolveed away from,

or "revered" by the agency of younger suck-ups

hoping to advance careers;

they're fortunate stiffs who're deaf and dumb

immune to praise and criticism,

but I don't wish that I were one

Yeats, rime Carruth, Kunitz-

their books accumulate no dust

on the Active shelf of my bookcase.

They're the authors I consult

But just now, dusting Ariel,

I heard a Siren's thin, high wail:

come and die a glamorous death.

Oh in what way I'll envy Sylvia Plath

when I'm dead, too, overspreaded with dust.

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Sep/Oct 2004

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