1.
You were never silly like us—except with those
God-awful cats—the moment’s surrender,
impoverished sex life, hernias, discomfiture,
physical decay . . . Staid England pinched you
into poetry. Now the world has its money madness
and its psychopathic swill. And poetry goes on
making nothingness happen, barely surviving
in the folly of its aping where ambitious editors
would never want to linger, still goes south
bristling with self-referentials and maudlin griefs,
raw wounds we yearn for and would die for.
It survives, a way of harping on, to bad-mouth.
2.
Lord, receive this queasy guest:
Possum Tom is laid to rest.
Let this transatlantic vessel sail
Bringing England Yankee mail.
In the early winter dark
All the dogs of Wall Street bark,
And the living nations cower,
Each suggesting this be the hour;
Rank ethical disgrace
Sags in every mirror’s face,
And the rage of mansions waits
Locked and loaded behind iron gates.
Follow, Possum, follow right
To the bottom of the shite,
With your sepulchral banker’s voice
Show us how to evade all choice.
When John Bull threw down your verse,
And thundered heaven with his curse,
Did you smile your work to see?
Did he who made the iamb make thee?
Possum! Possum! weaving nay
Somehow into Christian yea,
What sleight of hand or mental leap
Can put my restless soul to sleep?
This poem is dedicated to Alicia E. Stallings.
Blackbird
An online journal of literature and the arts
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Ron Smith
Former Virginia Poet Laureate Ron Smith’s books are Moon Road, Its Ghostly Workshop, The Humility of the Brutes, and That Beauty in the Trees, all from LSU Press. His first collection, Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, has recently been issued in an enhanced second edition by MadHat Press. Smith’s poems have been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, and have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, including The Nation, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Plume, and Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry. His column “Red Guitar” appeared in Blackbird from 2005 to 2007. Awards include Southern Poetry Review’s Guy Owen Award, Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, and the Carol Weinstein Poetry Prize. He has taught poetry and poetry writing at three universities and was the first-ever Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School, where he now serves as Consultant in Poetry and Prose. Since 2010 he’s been Poetry Editor of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.
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