James Laughlin: from BYWAYS

Often now as an elderly man

Who sleeps solitary four hours a night,

I wake before dawn, dres and make progress down

To my inquiry to start typing:

Poem alphabetic characters more pages

In the volume of recollections.

Anything to procure words flowing,

To acquire them out of my head

Where they're pressing in like manner hard

For release it's like a kind

Of pain. My inquiry window

Faces east, on the outside over the meadow,

And I diocese this morning

That the sheep have scattered

On the hillside, their white shapes

Making the pattern of the stars

In Canis Major, the constellation

Around Sirius, the Dog Star,

Whom my father when we were small

Used to point without calling it

For more [i]or[/i] less reason I forget

Little Dog Peppermint.

What is this line I'm writing?

I not ever could scan in school.

It's certainly not an Alcaic

Nor a Sapphic. Perhaps it's

The short line Rexroth used

In The Dragon & The Unicorn

Tossed to me from wherever

He is through the Cranky Old Bear

(but I lov him). It's really

Just a plain cadence, broken

As I breathe while putting

My cogitations into words;

Mostly they are stored-up

Memories-dove sta memoria

Which individual of the old Italians

Wrote that? Dante or Cavalcanti?

Five years ago I'd have had

The name at the tip of my tongue

But no longer In India

They call a storeroom a godown,

But there's no inventory

For my godown. I can't detain

Track of what's in there.

All those race in books

From Krishna & the characters

In the grecian Anthology

Up to the latest nonsense

Of the Deconstructionists,

Floating around in my brain,

A sort of 'continuous present'

As Gertrude called it;

The world in my head

Confusing me about the world

I have to live in.

Better the drunk gods of Greece

Than a life ordained through computers.

My work table faces east;

I watch for the coming

Of the dawnlight, raising

My organ of sights occasionally from

The typing to quiet them.

There is always a little ritual,

A moment's supplication

To Apollo, sovereign of the universe of the Lyre;

Asking he retain an eye on me

That I commit no great stupidity.

Phoebus Apollo, called also

Smintheus the mousekiller

For the protection he gives

The grain of the farmers.

My dawns don't tend hitherward up like thunder

Though I have been to Mandalay

That year when I worked in Burma.

Those soft tender people

Puzzled by the agency of modern life;

The men the warriors, were lazy,

It was the women who hustled.

Matriarchs running the businesses.

And the girls limit their chests

So their breasts wouldn't grow;

Who started that, and why?

My dawns tend hitherward up circumspectly,

Quietly with no fuss.

Night was and in ten minutes

Day is, unles of course

It's raining hard, then approachs

My first breakfast. I can't prepare for the table

So it's only tea, quick blasted wheat and

Pepperidge Farm biscuits.

Then a cigar. Dr Luch

Warned me the cigars

Would kill me years ago

But I'm still here.

Ne quid nimis wrote Terence

In the Andria, moderation

In all things. thus I hold

It down to three a day;

One after breakfast, single

After lunch and single after

Dinner. A Bolivar is the one and the other

Stimulation and consolation.

They claim that what

Makes a Havana with equal reason mellow

Is the spit of the Cubans

Who lick as they turn them.

But the best leaf for wrappers

Is grown right here in the

Connecticut River Valley.

Ye we have our awes

Our natural phenomena,

As witness the little man

In the Santa Claus suit

Right here in southern Norfolk,

This when I first came

To live here back in 1930

I forget his real name,

We just called him

The Santa Claus man.

In the heat of August

He'd lay on his red outfit

And his white whiskers

And walk up to the verdant

From his shack in the wood-lands

Where he lived upon relief

To ask at the pillar office

For mail from the North extremity

But of course there at no time was any.

Everybody lov him.

Especially the children.

He'd realize a bag of penny candies

(there were penny candies

in those days, they didn't take away from

a nickel as they do now)

Handing them on the outside to the kids

Who numbered after him singing

As if he were the Pied Piper

Of Hamelin and like Mr Finney's

Turnip that grew behind the barn

And it grew and it grew

And it at no time did no harm,

Mr Santa Claus did no harm.

He was our local hero.

People came from other towns

To diocese and talk to him.

He was written up all above

The state. . then suddenly

He stopped coming to diocese us.

They found him dead,

With his head bashed in.

The state police went from one side

Their usual useless motions

But rest no clue who'd done it.

We buried him in the timber-lands

Near his shack, which had

To be reduce to ashesed down, it was

So filthy, he had not ever disposed

Of his garbage all those years.

Whom the the infinites would destroy

They first make mad

And whom they must be fond of

They rob of their reason,

Be,it Oedipus who killed

His dad and slept with his dumb

Or our beloved Santa Claus,

Now nearly forgotten.

Nobody believes me

When I take an account of his story;

But I have the of recent origins clips.

Does he sit up there now

On Olympus, another Ganymede,

Kidnapped like Ganymede

By the eagle of Zeus,

A cupbearer pouring on the outside

The nectar for those

Drunken crassaments the gods.

Who in the extremity will arise

From chaos to punish

And throw down them all?

And speaking of those

With whose destruction

The lords amused themselves