Literacy: An Abandoned Ode

An Abandoned Ode
for Max Steele

Poems bore me so much
I have quit worrying about them.
I read, needless to say, a great deal,
But few poems.
I shall talk to them, for a change,
And tell them that I can see quite through them:
Sleeves cobbled up out of amplified trampolines
Like glass showcases full of glass geese,
Metaphors like successful anacondas
Processing some more or less innocent
Examples of local fauna — enough!

A hundred broken arrowheads
Exhibited in a common cotton coffin:
Who's the muse of museums? Mortalita.

The universe is one long National Geographic .
Or else, the universe is one long clothesline
Strung from the front porch of a grocery store
To a coil of Reader's Digests ready at the left hand
Of God the Dada Almighty.

The many-colored clothes hang in no wind. Enough.

Prose? Prose, especially Herodotus, I still can
Manage to handle well enough — until, that is,
The proper names start surfacing.
When Wilbur Bigelow opens the Dutch door though
I shut the book.

The natural state of books
Is shut, after all,
As of people, asleep. . . .

An Abandoned Ode
for Max Steele

Poems bore me so much
I have quit worrying about them.
I read, needless to say, a great deal,
But few poems.
I shall talk to them, for a change,
And tell them that I can see quite through them:
Sleeves cobbled up out of amplified trampolines
Like glass showcases full of glass geese,
Metaphors like successful anacondas
Processing some more or less innocent
Examples of local fauna — enough!

A hundred broken arrowheads
Exhibited in a common cotton coffin:
Who's the muse of museums? Mortalita.

The universe is one long National Geographic .
Or else, the universe is one long clothesline
Strung from the front porch of a grocery store
To a coil of Reader's Digests ready at the left hand
Of God the Dada Almighty.

The many-colored clothes hang in no wind. Enough.

Prose? Prose, especially Herodotus, I still can
Manage to handle well enough — until, that is,
The proper names start surfacing.
When Wilbur Bigelow opens the Dutch door though
I shut the book.

The natural state of books
Is shut, after all,
As of people, asleep. . . .
Translation: 
Language: 
Rate this poem: 

Reviews

No reviews yet.