The things you find in an electronic shoebox. I was looking for something about an owl (‘búho’ in Spanish) and came across heaps of unfinished stanzas not about owls. One fragment took me viscerally back to an experience in Meung-sur-Loire in 1999 which I wrote up as a dairy entry: a true story revised today for metre.

Like a Sunday’s child who is born on the thirteenth,
the lovely waitress wafts mixed signals out.
Unfortunately for all, each vagrant breeze
makes diners think she’s bringing them the cheese
or has stepped in Stilton, Camembert or Brie
It gets worse when she explains, ‘C’est moi – it’s me.’

Superbly scrambled eggs with fresh-cut truffle
illuminate why porkers and we scuffle
for delicacies that both our species share
a passion for. The swine think us unfair
in ruling who and whom goes in whose trough.
I hear behind my back a porcine cough.

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.