PREFERRENCE

Though dead since living memory runneth not to the contrary

Professor Longfellow tries to keep up with modern poetry

Reading it in English, French, German, Italian, Greek

And Proto-Uralian, which is not really a language

But a conjuration of  parti-colored singing molluscs.

If Harvard summons him back (he was chairman

Of the Department of Modern Languages) he intends

To begin lecturing as if his death in 1882 was merely

A species of inconvenience.

                                                            Though he tries hard

He cannot keep up and so has only recently reached

The Collected Poems of Babette Deutch, published

In 1969 by Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY.

He enjoyed the pale old men playing chess by a squalid window

And thought he could have done something with her three nuns

Listening to Chopin. On the whole, he approved. Then, conscientious

As he always was and still is, to the extent that he is anything now,

He read the front and back blurbs and was startled to see his name

In her brief biography: “She was composing verse before

She could write, and likes to recall that in primary school

She preferred Blake to Longfellow.”

                                                                        Likes to recall!

Did she sit, then, by an old mirror whose glass was thick

At the bottom and thin at the top, sifting memories,

For a young interviewer and, with a smile, saying “Yes,

It is quite true; even in primary school I preferred Blake

To Longfellow?” Perhaps she worked it into bedtime stories

For her two children, five grandchildren and the one great-grandchild

Who hastily had himself born just in time to get a look-in’

In her obituary on the New York Times of November 15, 1982:

“Then the clever child led the prince, the porringer, the pedagogue

And the enchanted pump-handle back to the palace, telling them

That, though still a girl in primary school, she had decided

That Henry Longfellow could not hold a candle to William Blake.

And they all lived happily ever after.”

THE OLD STORY

… there is a Russian tale about a prince
Who every day rides a hundred leagues or more
And every evening finds old Baba Yaga waiting
With a courteous greeting and a pot of stew.
After a very long time he notices
That each Baba Yaga is slightly younger
Than the one he saw the night before.
In its only surviving version the story breaks off
When the prince is chatting with a Baba Yaga
Whose hair has just started to go grey.
I've often wondered how the story ends
Or if it has ended at all. Perhaps the prince
Now meets Baba Yagas so young
He must bring in kindling and light the oven.
Perhaps he sings to them or tells them stories
Of all he's seen and of the other Baba Yagas
Each of them a day's ride from the next.
Or maybe one morning he says
"Come along, Baba Yaga! Climb up behind;
A brisk day's ride waits for us both
And stew, a hundred leagues away."

PRIVILEGES OF RANK

As the well-attested case of Sweeny shows

Mad kings gain the gift of flight, sleep rough,

Perch in trees, speak the language of birds.

Mad princes hover a few inches above the ground

And can follow a conversation among sparrows

A mad archduke gains a modicum of grace

And the grass does not bend beneath his feet.

When a commoner is found doing loops

Five hundred feet up the government

Immediately raises him to the peerage.