Poetry Lessons For The Growing Boy

The first time I saw

Betty Grater swoon

and heard Ms Arnault sigh

in expectation

I knew I had found the answer

that all young men seek

Instead of good looks

and the scent of money

I realized that the tippled sound of Thomas,

the piston drive of Cummings,

or shroud and mystery of Rimbaud

could accomplish what fumbling

postures never could

They could make a button come

undone and stay that way

part a leg and have it

remain languid

see an arm brushed

and not pulled back

Ah, but women are not

so easily wooed

You see, poetry is but a beginning

once is never sufficient

and Cyrano found

he was forced to return

and return

to keep those fires burning

Soon you discover it is not enough

to merely sing another’s tune

and you must learn the art

whose muse is not so

easily tamed

So the new poems to Emily or Mary Lou

are steeped in ignorance, stumbling tongue

and emotion that knows only extreme

a Dickinson hodgepodge of flowers,

spring-rain and metaphor trampled

by testosterone expectation

And as these women grow

you discover the magic is fading

that they have learned these lures

and their virtue will not part quite so easy

Ah, but art is ever inventive

and for those hard to dissemble

there are the more obscure songs

of Baudelaire, Jefferson and Yeats

these will free even the firmest

of corset-strung objections

But to truly reach the promised land

there is need to create one’s own

to wrestle the evening with nature’s muse

and tease a line between the sheets

Then, if you've still a mind

you can glance to see

if her clothes have been shed

But the sad and beautiful truth

is that poetry’s muse will suffer no others

rarely will that graceful form stay the course

she will leave to find yet another

that can keep them

coming

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