When Lisette came to live here as au pair
our neighbour’s wife was furious we’d dare
import a beauty (and Lisette’s nineteen).

Her husband managed soon to tear our screen,
insisted he would fix it, brought his tools,
and talked ‘their’ language to Lisette. The fool.

Had schools, he asked her, changed since he had left?
Was nicking bikes still not considered theft?

Like me a decade older than this girl,
he as a writer has the time to whirl
around Lisette, take our kids to the lake
accompanied by her, hot dogs and cake.

When we come home at six, or eight, or nine,
she tells us how Monsieur has been so kind
to hold a ladder while she saved a cat,
or pump a tire he showed her had gone flat.

His wife, who works in Fairfield selling art,
has told us she’s considering a part
in Westport’s next production of The Shrew.

She can rehearse at home and be with Hugh,
the Labrador her husband gave her when
he had no time to train it anymore.

I hear that he’s inspired and writing more.
His newest work is foreign: Je t’adore.

An unfurnished mind, for example mine, is fun to decorate.
You can throw anything you like inside; the dendrites find it great.

A furnished mind, one unlike mine, is lumbered with a grate
that blocks new input and is snide and can’t expectorate.

You cannot if you expectorate expect to highly rate
with those to whom infinitives split are calls to be irate.

.
(lines 11,317 through 11,322, volume 7, of imaginary novel Autonomous Rifle)

This imagined schoolroom exercise naturally (?) arose after writing a few lines to go with one that I was playing with (‘You can trip the light, Fantastic’) and then thinking about how ‘analytical’ teaching can put someone off poetry forever.

This week’s assigned poem:

Pup Tent Music
The tent’s dark reigned till he turned on the light
and leapt about all sunnily and glad.
They’d had sex again: this time it had been his.
‘I was wonderful,’ he said. ‘I am fantastic.’
She answered, ‘You can trip the light, Fantastic.’

Activities:

Read the assigned poem out loud in your own laughable accent and again in a highfalutin voice like your teacher’s.

Laugh at the clumsiness of your fellow pupils. Try to pick a fight with the smallest one.

Return to your seat and write out your answers to the following questions:

1. What does the title largely mean? Does it have everything to do with dogs liking music? Nothing at all? Do you like cats? Does the poet like cats, but is trying to suppress it?

2. Explain the solar and lunar allusions conjured by the poem’s use of the words ‘reigned’ and ‘sunnily’.

3. Parse each line looking for rhythmic hiccoughs and spelling errors. Mark the former with green pencil and the latter with red. Count the marks and divide the number of green marks by the number of red marks. (For extra credit explain why the number of red marks cannot equal zero.)

4. Explain why you enjoyed this poem especially if you did not.

5. Does your mother know you are a connoisseur of smut? To avoid the school board having to tell her, explain line three in a nice way.

6. What is the poetaster trying to tell us in the last line of the poem? Is what ‘she’ answers a constructionally idiosyncratic idiom, in that it is impossible to construct a meaningful literal-scene from the formal structure? Is this a wink to Procul Harum more than to Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST?

Your score for this assignment counts for one-third of your term grade for English.

Isn’t poetry fun!

Amiss Eugene. Lawn thyme know sea.
Hugh nose wear ours spade?
Ere snot a glottal wee cane dew
awl oat thwart den aloofer made
inn eye wash harpy inure harms
weather ore snow yew ad wigged.
Thee season dun moor dandy worms
hand awl disc son cant eave affix
ah loan watt dazing knights boat through
aweigh hand lift may messing ewe.

Translation:
Ears aplomb /Here’s a poem:

I miss you, Jean. Long time no see.
Who knows where hours sped?
There’s not a lot that we can do
although thou were then a lovely maid
and I was happy in your arms
whether or no you had twigged.
The sea’s undone more than he warms
and all this sun can’t even fix
alone what days and nights both threw
away and left me missing you.

Too bad we did not read back in December
the Christmas menu in that magazine
that’s called ENOUGH. It starts, as I remember,
with fresh-tomato soup, then aubergines
well roasted on a glowing charcoal ember,
then leeks and eggs in a curry-rice tureen.
Boiled pears with honey crown this festive meal
leaving no one hungry, and none whose senses reel,

and none in debt: just eighty cents a member
feeds all the clan the press-gangs can drag home.
Not having read it, we had men dismember
a bird, a cow-child and a garden gnome
and flog the bits in pieces (boxed in timber)
so we could boil them, baying leaves and foam;
then rack and barbecue them as a roast
we washed down with our conscience and a toast.

In a land employing ‘shock and awe’ as its tools to force agreement
In a culture with no filmic hero who does not kill
In an environment in which how you win at games
is by making what you call monsters bleed and die

is it really strange or more than normally deranged
that some youngsters try to make the unreal real
– or the other way around – and take up tools
(how trite to target exclusively the guns) to blow away

themselves and while they are at it all that’s dear.
How easy now to cry, how impossible not to.
We may make some laws to ease at least our conscience
but there’s little chance we will blow away our delusions.

I threw a crumb of cheese into the fire
and logs fell over. Flames licked blue. Pine snapped.
The tiny crumb, a molten mote no higher
than the hat on the flea on the elf’s coat, flared and mapped
itself into a shadow flash that flew
on flue wards, a one-molecule fondue
that no one noted except the elf, and me,
and the flea in her tiny too-tight Christmas hat.
What spirit of the hearth had set it free?
‘’Twas me,’ the smoke spoke, arching like a cat.

The flea, the elf, and I, stared at the cat.
Though it heard the flea’s faint ‘How’d you do that?’ shout,
at first the cat ignored us while it sat
there licking its fur, the burned bits winking out.
Then it sized us up and I thought I saw it smile.
‘I’m the Christmas cat, and I’ve come to help you while
away the hours that fuel this Christmas Eve.
You spent the morning driving yourselves to near
depression pricing presents, and then came home to grieve.
Not one of you remembers Christmas cheer.’

‘I do,’ the elf said. ‘When younger, I believed
that the dirty old man I helped was Santa Claus.
He told me, ‘Here’s your bonus, up this sleeve,’
and he took advantage. I still see his paws…’
‘You are making that up, you naughty lying twit!’
the cat hissed, clawing where the elf would sit.
But the elf, even quicker, hung himself from the mantel with care,
so the cat, saving face, confronted the Yule flea and me.
‘Today in the sun, when you three were enjoying the air,’
she asked, ‘did you think beyond lunch and the beach and the sea?’

The flea in her too-tight hat piped, ‘I remember
when the snow would grow and you would tell us stories.’
The Christmas cat thought hard on that; an ember
in her fur glowed gold. ‘Ghosts,’ the flea said. ‘Glories.’
The cat purred, pleased as gin becomes with lime.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Once upon a time…’
And the elf rejoined the little Yule flea and me
while we stared the fire down and listened to the cat
as she retold old tales: Nativity,
and mistletoe hunts, and more even better than that.

All the stores close their registers, bolt their glass doors.
All the shoppers go home, except one who explores
the car park for hoof prints, for he’s hoping to find
the traces of reindeer. They have left him behind.

He’d stopped for one eggnog, and he had the worst luck,
for who should be sitting in the Feather and Duck?
His mate from the Navy, drinking sloe gin and lime.
They ranted old chanteys and he lost track of time.
They rejigged the hornpipe then they spliced the main brace.
As dusk came his buddy fell flat on his face.

He’d paid both their tabs from his good buddy’s cash,
left a note in his vest, ‘Don’t go throw up the sash.’
Now amok in the car park, casting light with his nose,
he attracts folks’ attention. They notice his clothes,
his felt-padded belly, fin de siècle high boots.
‘Hey, dude, you and Batman, are you two in cahoots?’

Déjà vu thoughts, old history that’s happened before,
make him run to a diner, make him pound on its door.
‘Let me in. You will like me, for giving’s my bag.’

‘Come in, Hansel.’ His greeter’s a grotty old hag
who jerks him inside, saying, ‘You’re safe here from harm.
Oh, I so loved your sister, especially her arm.’

As gingerly, quietly, he breaks from her grip
to go dash up her chimney, surprised at his clip,
he notes he’s so agile it must be a gift.

‘Gift’ causes him panic as his redlined mind shifts
to the job he’s been trusted with: flying the skies
bringing presents to children. ‘My reindeer!’ he cries.
‘They’ve deserted me sadly. This evening will go
to the dogs like some royals I press-release know.
To the pits like some pols who this year gained their fat
by skinning poor peasants and avoiding the VAT.
I’m running on empty while the men who run guns
pay for adverts portraying them as better than nuns.
The guardians of Gaia have lost every round
this year to consumers, while sly pundits have found
silver linings invented to draw oohs and aahs
from the rabble (that’s me) who could care less because
we can’t find clear targets for to focus our rage
and beliefs are derided. Pedestrian age!’

As his cri de coeur echoes through uncaring streets
an angel approaches, bearing kindness and sweets.
She embraces the sad man: ‘You’re muddled and lost.
All the chances we’ve sent you are toys you’ve tossed
from your crib into the river. You’ve tried Not to soar.
You’re a raving lost tot. Never mind “never more.”
Here’s a new chance for Christmas (its meaning, you know);
here’s a sleigh, brand new reindeer, a leg up. Now go.
To the top of your courage, to the end of the mall,
to the places you dream of. I will let you fall,
but I won’t let it hurt you the grey, deadly way
that not caring shells you. Go out now, and play.’

As his angel departs him, he straightens his spine,
then whistles his eight deer, perhaps they are nine.
‘It’s Christmas, me hearties, and we’re ready for flight.
“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”‘