Classic Poem

And who is the great Bela?
— The Cocktail Party

Rare earths, my dear, are neither rare nor earths.

Another Holy Roman Empire bites
The dust.
Realms are so seldom what they seem,
So seldom what their names denote or sound like.
Another empire kicks another bucket
With a thud like Wallace Stevens walking south.
Autonomous People's Republic: ha.
Ho ditto ditto ditto ditto hum.
Your eyes equal two flowers not exactly alike.

Reality is not reality
Until its negative denies it cold
In a freeze frame of contradictory vectors,
Like megrim rickracks ring the field of vision
Zigzag, vice versa, sine lines broken into.

One wonders what the world is all about.
Among such wonderings, one also yawns.
One wonders what these seeming beings mean.

Across the street, in Mrs. Sasser's yard,
Mist drifts among the pines and crab apples.
Cones seem to dogpaddle in those shallows.

Skim milk adrift, intimate of gravity.

The clock says six o'clock; then 6:01.
The second hand looks like the mercury
In the thermometer: long, red, and quick.

These are the hours when the television reverts
To atavistic movies from Hoover's day
Whose women's eyes look lunar when they cringe.

Some of them have been dead for fifty years!
These are the hours and halves of hours of death.

Round-shouldered, forever shivering in skimpy
Dresses, they hold their hands out to some monster
Palm outwards. Their voices sound like oboes and bassoons.

These are the moons of Hungary.
Bela
Lugosi, Bartok, Kun — one wonders whom.
And who was the great one? The one who wrote
Panicky epics to smooth the Empire's pikes.

This is the way from Prague to Budapest.
That is the way from Budapest to Prague.