CROWDED

The thoughts I had thought the night before

Were waiting for me in my bed, insisting

I think them again. They had apparently

Spent the entire day just lying about

And looked dissipated. One of them

Was smoking a fake meerschaum pipe

That I’d thrown away in 1987. Another,

Wore a preposterous hat, a cross somehow

Between a floppy musketeer sort of thing

And the odd felt crown Jughead wears

To go careening down a Riverdale street

In a bathtub while Archie attempts to steer.

Then there was the one who insisted

She had been personally brushed aside

By Catherine the Great and had spent

Three years trapped in an unfinished dream

Of the beautiful Princess Dashkova. 

I found this awkward as I had invited

A crowd of much higher-class thoughts

To join me. (One of them was almost new;

The rest could pass for new in a kindly light)

They could not be put off; we all crowded in.

I got little sleep; my head never found the pillow.

When I finally dozed I was poked awake

By the idea with a hat; he and the Russian thought

(I considered her accent a little exaggerated, myself)

Were in love and wished me, as captain of the bed,

To marry them. The other thoughts were members

Of the wedding party. Some of them had swords

(Which fact rather worries me) and made an alley

For the bride and groom. All of them

Have gone along on the honeymoon leaving me

Completely thoughtless. Worse, they’ve taken

Half the covers and the pillow with them.

JUST THE FACTS

          The Kraken has slept since before the world’s first beginning and has managed to stay asleep on the ocean’s floor through every beginning since, even the extravagantly loud ones and the one made mostly of screeching colored lights which Coyote made to win a wager. So long has he slept that his dreams have put on substance and walk about as men, though their way in the world is seldom easy.

          If you look at Moxon’s edition of the Collected Poems (though you never bought a copy and were never given one, one has appeared on your shelves) there is a poem about the Kraken which Alfred Tennyson wrote when he was 18 or so, in which he summarizes the Kraken’s fate which is, at the end of the world to “rise roaring to the surface” and die. Tennyson, however, died well before the Kraken, and was waylaid on his way to the afterlife by the ghost of his friend Edward Fitzgerald.

          When they thought of Tennyson, his friends usually did not first think of his being a great poet. Cigars summed him up for some; others thought of his beard, his extravagant sorrow over Hallam’s death, his temper, or his grandly fluent profanity. For Fitzgerald, the essence of Tennyson had communicated itself to the hats he wore, which were no sooner clapped on his head than they underwent peculiar changes, as if their identity had become fluid. It is a rare if pointless gift to be able to effortlessly make a silk top hat fancy itself a sombrero.

          Fitzgerald had been a noticing man, and had become a noticing ghost. He had been shadowing Tennyson’s spirit for some while and was sure it had started out bare-headed. Somehow, it had acquired a hat of even more than ordinary disreputability. “Tennyson, that is an appalling hat!”

          “Fitz? How glad I am to see you! Strange; I never imagined those as the first words I’d hear after I died.”

          “I had something much more impressive prepared but that hat has driven them out of my head.”

LOVE WHICH HAS NO HAT

In an old French book a man’s love

Takes off its hat to say goodbye;

Why is my love not like that?

I don’t think it’s ever owned a hat

And, if it did, it’s never worn it.

Unkempt, unshaven, stumble-tongued –

It knows nothing of good manners

(I wouldn’t be surprised if it drinks, too)

I could, I suppose, buy my love a hat

A jaunty one, with a tall feather --

But what if it then grew vain

And insisted I rig it out as a musketeer

Complete with cape and high boots

A  tabard and, of course, a musket?

Not even in dreams does wisdom say

Teach your love the use of firearms.

THE LIFE ARTISTIC

Young women -- often Marthe -- were his favorite models. He painted them in a hat, in a turban, with a pink collar, with a seagull, blending into a landscape, clustered in an interior, walking, seated, leaning over a basket of fruit.

Bonnard: Shimering Color, pp. 72-73 (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 2000)

It wasn't easy doing all those things at once

Though everyone liked seeing me in my pink collar,

Turban and hat. Where Bonnard found his sea gulls

I have never known. They were strangely tame

But had eyes too considering for birds

And when they screeched they seemed embarassed;

You could almost see them wishing for quotemarks

As if "graw!" and "ankhh ankhh!" were being said

Under constraint. So, on one of my posing days

When I was blending, clustered, walking, seated

While leaning over a basket of fruit and Bonnard

Asked me to balance a wine glass on my nose

And hum the Marseilles, I looked at the seagull

For inspiration. He shook his head slightly

That was enough. "M. Bonnard! It has been a pleasure

To model for a man Henri Matisse will some day

Certify as a great painter but I fear we must part;

What you want is beyond human endurance. Perhaps

You should see if the zoo has a trained seal

Who could use ten francs for two hours posing."

THE VICEGERENTS

Leaning forward, almost whispering,
The preacher said "This morning when
I prayed to God, there was No One there!
I could get no explanation;
Dark-winged angels would not meet my eye."

Beneath their hats, three church ladies stirred --
A sub-committee, prepared for this contingency --
But before they could rise, the preacher's cat
Had leapt into the altar. "Until God returns
We are in charge. Feed us; brush us
And you will find us not unkindly."