All Poems
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Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer
© Ogden Nash
This is a song to celebrate banks,
Because they are full of money and you go into them and all
you hear is clinks and clanks,
Or maybe a sound like the wind in the trees on the hills,
Always Marry An April Girl
© Ogden Nash
Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
Adventures Of Isabel
© Ogden Nash
Isabel met an enormous bear,
Isabel, Isabel, didn't care;
The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,
The bear's big mouth was cruel and cavernous.
A Word to Husbands
© Ogden Nash
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever youre wrong, admit it;
Whenever youre right, shut up.
A Tale Of The Thirteenth Floor
© Ogden Nash
The bum reached out and he tried to shout,
But the door in his face was slammed,
And silent as stone he rode down alone
From the floor of the double-damned.
A Lady Who Thinks She Is Thirty
© Ogden Nash
Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.
A Drink With Something In It
© Ogden Nash
There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
A Caution To Everybody
© Ogden Nash
Consider the auk;
Becoming extinct because he forgot how to fly, and could only walk.
Consider man, who may well become extinct
Because he forgot how to walk and learned how to fly before he thinked.
The Obesion
© Craig Erick Chaffin
Hawaiians once believed
that mana was proportional to mass,
so royalty were encouraged to overeat,
confirming Newton's laws before they knew
Europeans thought it gauche
to serve Captain Cooke stew.
The Patriot
© Nissim Ezekiel
I am standing for peace and non-violence.
Why world is fighting fighting
On the Anthropic Principle
© Craig Erick Chaffin
Here at the spoke-ends of our galaxy
it is easy to forget the central axle
moving insensibly slow, still
the silvery-white dispersion of stars
soothes randomly until we impose a pattern,
like the Magi, like the Greeks.
Last Poem of my 45th Year
© Craig Erick Chaffin
I thought of how a whale's white ribs
could choke the sky's blue neck,
massive vertebrae half-buried in sand,
Leaf Sermon
© Craig Erick Chaffin
I have been spiritually poisoned
by the unclean, in ignorance
blessed their springs.
In consequence I withered
At the Vietnam War Memorial
© Craig Erick Chaffin
Black granite stretches its harsh, tapering wings
up to pedestrian-level grass
but sucks me down, here, at the intersection of names.
I forgive, I must, though I wish something
could heal this wound in the earth.
Drug Trial
© Craig Erick Chaffin
You saw rattlesnakes mate in the arroyo
tangled like hoses, braided
like black ropes for a day,
utterly vulnerable in the grip
of love or instinct.
At the Aquarium of the Pacific
© Craig Erick Chaffin
I saw a brilliant angelfish whose tail
and fins shimmered yellow until it turned
and silver spread like an undercoat of fur
when stroked against the nap, across its scales.
A Time to Weep
© Craig Erick Chaffin
I suppose you could call me heartless
as a dull anvil clanking in a sodden barn,
the damp wood too lazy to echo your pain;
and your limbs twisted like great roots,
Year's End
© Marilyn Hacker
Twice in my quickly disappearing forties
someone called while someone I loved and I were
making love to tell me another woman had died of cancer.
The Boy
© Marilyn Hacker
It is the boy in me who's looking out
the window, while someone across the street
mends a pillowcase, clouds shift, the gutter spout
pours rain, someone else lights a cigarette?
Scars on Paper
© Marilyn Hacker
An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
