Between the Gardening and the Cookery
Comes the brief Poetry shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.
Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.
Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape Near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.
I travel, you see, I think and I can read"
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,
The ladies choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.
Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Mans love is of mans life a thing apart;
Girls arent like that.
We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women dont seem to think thats good enough;
They write about it.
And the awful way their poems lay them open
Just doesnt strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.
Deciding this, we can forget those times
We stayed up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
And couldnt write.
