SAMPLE POEMS
Copyright © 2019 by Victor Altshul
Boarding School
You had to know my pal Chelminski
to take full measure
of his unfettered enthusiasm for mischief.
One day, for no apparent reason,
he wrote
PEANUT BUTTER
on the blackboard in history class,
its chalky mockery hidden
behind a Mercator projection of the world,
pulled down to conceal the silliness beneath;
he wrote
PEANUT BUTTER
in red paint in the tiled foyer
on the plinth of a bronze statue of Abe Lincoln
(its nose an erotic protuberance stroked
by giggling, complicit teenage fingers);
he wrote
PEANUT BUTTER
on our textbooks, on our lockers, in the halls,
on the floors beneath our beds,
and at last, on the door
to the headmaster’s living room.
Ah yes, our headmaster, the sanctimonious Tall Paul,
eventually found the ebullient prankster out,
“Chelminski,” he intoned before the entire school,
“I find your all too inappropriate treatment of
PEANUT BUTTER
low,
common,
cheap,
vulgar
and disgusting.
And here Tall Paul paused, gratified
to enunciate his favorite adjectives,
to wrinkle his skyward nose
and condemn adolescent masturbation.
From somewhere behind invisible curtains we could hear Chelminski giggle.
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Abel
morgue drawer open rolled,
face gouged misshapen
fast train jump and bounce and roll
and bounce and roll and bounce and roll
eyelids flutter eyes take in
jaw and lips and tongue loosening
voice throat breath rasping gurgling
you were a shit it’s true it’s true
I don’t blame you not you not you
you did not cause my phrenia
my schizo frigging phrenia
true you were quite mean quite mean
true your hands not clean not clean
though you were a frigging pain
you did not push me from the train
shit though you were you did not cause
my phrenia my phrenia
that voice that screamed I am a shit
you were not the source of it
true you were quite mean quite mean
but don’t forget the gene the gene
nor overlook our darling mother
you suffered too my clever brother
You were a shit how true how true
I don’t blame you not you not you
you did not cause my phrenia
my schizo frigging phrenia
Eyelids flutter, eyes discolor
La commedia è finita brother
my frigging phrenia is done with over
you poor suffering Ivy asshole. |
Dog Days
Come back from my past, Willie, please
jump up to me and strain against the leash;
your tongue, protruding, arching toward my face—
sit right there, brown-eyes, wet-nose, and slaver,
marveling how I have grown much braver.
In those days I’m sure that you could see
that even gentle dogs were not for me.
I’d recoil at your jumping in my space;
and even the most surreptitious fart
would provoke a disproportionate start.
Seventy years and more have proved
me sturdier since I missed that chance for love.
Then I didn’t know the meaning of your bays.
I have learned since then to make dog noises,
having won some high-school language prizes.
This is what I’m trying to get at, Willie:
I want another chance to pat your belly.
Please understand that in those cruel days
I was just a frightened boy who screamed
each time you barked, and never even dreamed
that taunting you would be so rough
on you, that dogs made fun of long enough
might run away and join a band of strays,
all wheezing out their panting, fetid breath—
oh Willie, you repelled me half to death. |
No Exit
You have just enough time
to take cover behind the stalks
of gleaming wheat, bright yellow
in the cloudless morning sky.
If I could, I’d cry out to you, Run!
Hide behind the wheat,
where I can’t see you.
You don’t know what I have known
of golden wheat
and wheat fields blackened by fire.
I would do better
to sit on a great lawn in springtime,
in eternal verdant equinox,
smiling, invisible, impotent.
You, no longer marked for death,
would saunter by, dressed elegantly
or not as means allow,
as on one of Renoir’s summer afternoons,
in lively conversation with other living souls,
the lawn an emerald oasis watered by joy. |
Tom Knows Nothing about Pelicans
Walking along a Carolina shore
I see three pelicans flying in a row
and plan to write about this splendid bird
in spite of Tom, who babbles on
about the heron and claims no pelicans
can be seen along the endless sands
of southern coasts. Just to think
that I would ever mistake a heron
for a pelican! I’m sorry to have to say
that Tom knows nothing about pelicans;
and I do not want to write about herons
right now in any case, and this is why:
last month I wrote a clever villanelle
about a heron that imagines that no one
can imagine it is imagining,
and Tom made a spectacle of himself,
gratuitously proclaiming his disdain
in a fit of ill-disguised pique.
How fed up I am with this captious fool
who bloviates with scant wit on the heron,
sniffing at the worthy feathers of pelicans,
those gaily painted vanes with hues so bright
they make my frizzy hairs shoot up.
Pelican, a dactyl without peer,
leaves the harshly aspirate trochee heron
sounding like an addictive drug. Oh, Tom,
let's talk about fast girls, or chess, instead |
Without George
If my grandson George
were to ask you
why the sky is blue,
and why darning
needles hover
above the pond,
and why the great
blue heron floats
downward to the right,
and you were to tell
him about prisms
and light refraction,
and about the stark
ineluctability
of biological systems,
and about Chomsky’s views
on deep structure
in avian instinct,
I would invite you
to dinner
without my grandson George |
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