Frank leans back in the
Too small chair
Big stomach raised to heaven
Arms in limbo, gravity’s slaves
Like, truth to tell,
So is the whole of him.
All his imagining,
All his vast interior splendor
Lies imprisoned within
Severed eternally by
The cruel barrier of reality
From all of heaven and earth
Dorothy Parker is, of course, famous for witticisms, short, incisive, and very quotable. One of my favorites is, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” But she was a fine poet as well, and along with her better-known light-hearted efforts were some very dark verses, so I’ve included two poems about love, one from each variety. I’ll let you decide which is the more serious.
Comment
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania
August
When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;
Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces’ pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.
Why doubt purity?
As if anything beyond a quark
Is in and of itself alone
As if essence were not a judgment
As if some notion, come to rest in a brain
Came bolting from divine dispatch
As if a single idea
Can express the contradictions
Of matter and spirit
Purists fling darts
From the comfort of the bubble,
Close ranks against orthodoctaroons
Remove splinters with exquisite surgery
All the while resembling utterly
The objects of their disdain
The truth is
The sum of our differences vanishes
Beside the sum of our sameness.
Just the right amount of insouciance
With earthy overtones, and ripe plump honey
Cocoa orchid cloves, with a clean finish.
Echoes of Bedouin twig fires
A trace of Sheba at the margins
And – I’m quite certain – a hint
Of wild goat on the Ethiopian highlands,
Of pomegranates shared willfully
In the caressing, endless night
Of tribal justice,
Of Bantu, Arab, and Chinese
Exchanging wisdom and profit,
Prophets, peace be upon them,
Be damned, at the trading table,
Of long years of captivity and release,
And captivity again, burning like hunger,
Shining like anger.
Of God and injustice, all blind
To the anguish of the children
He claimed as his own.
Perfect tender bitterness
Exchanged for the bitterness
of slaves on the sugar plantation,
Of generations’ riven ancestry
Evolved into the pathos of poverty.
Then, floating like some cup-bound cloud
Above the serene acidity,
Rich, billows of silky cream,
With traces of Swiss mountainside,
Or the Dells of Wisconsin,
Ancestral hunting grounds
Usurped for pasture,
Where the descendants of wild oxen
Empty their swollen udders,
Raw as a farmer’s neck in autumn.
The precise forces of living
Hinge on a paper-thin reality
Behind which lurk the illusions
We work so hard to uncover
The precise moment of discontinuity
Comes when we discover
That a lifetime of regrets
Is only a simple misunderstanding
The precise inclination of a heart
Determines the difference
Between love
And death
exiles child 