Redecorating Hell Mouth
–after a room at the Hickory Museum of Art, painted by Robert Oren Eades, a lawyer.
It’s serviceable as is.
I like the snakes and lawyers
and snakes.
But the space could use improvements.
For instance, I’d recommend
installing Cerberus
in the elevator,
and shocking him regularly
with a Tazer
so that he howls.
And the space needs furnishings:
a fainting couch covered in
prickly red plush;
a unisex “smoking”
with violet satin lapels and cuffs;
on a marble-topped
side table, arrange
a gleaming carafe of absinthe
with the correct glasses
and sugar cube strainer.
The weather is much too mild.
Occasional gusts
of sleet would be about right.
Perhaps thunder and lightning
on Sunday mornings.
And as to the floor:
a carpet of invisible corpses,
so each tentative step squelches
and slips,
oozes and stinks.
**
Byzantine Broadside
–unearthed during an archeological dig beneath a parking lot in Istanbul; Legal Series 411; carbon dated to 360 A.D.
Those who would be poets, beware!
Beware cunning witches
and false saints.
The heathen words of Homer
are a scandal.
Avoid them.
Avoid all gentile books,
all fables,
all alien writings.
If you desire poetics,
read the Prophets of God’s Law.
If you desire song,
be content with the Psalms.
Shun inelegance for strict rhetoric.
St. Basil says, “Reject
licentiousness, especially
the amatory adventures of the old gods.”
Read law.
Drink with prostitutes,
but avoid spectacles and the baths.
Do not turn somersaults;
disdain rowdiness,
ribaldry and joie de vivre.
Burn all texts of magic.
Use parchment for business only.
Wit and theater are allowed,
but only as rest from study.
Especially beware profligates
who ride fat mules.
Above all,
condemn originality.
**
Friend
–to Joanne, on her 80th birthday
You have a knack
for wearing red hats.
You have a knack
for finding gorgeous greeting cards,
for balancing Christianity with Judaism,
horror with remembrance,
honey with bitter herbs.
You have a knack
for ferreting out wonderful gifts:
a purple bear no bigger than my thumb,
antique Christmas doilies
because you know
how I enjoy presenting cookies
on doilies.
For sending jewelry
made by locals,
drawings by women of women.
You have a knack
of getting up again
when you fall flat.
You have a knack
of remembering:
on the eve of my son’s wedding,
quoting a poem I wrote for him
20 years before.
You have a knack
of being my friend.
