A DELIVERY OF DUNG

interrupted Wordsworth as he drafted “Intimations of Immortality.”
A timely wagonload
if one considers only
the title. An honest man knows
there is no such thing—immortality—hints or no hints.
I prefer Wordsworth the Younger,
his early/mid 30s, when the abovementioned
was written, when he, and Dorothy,
still had most of their teeth
and before he was spoiled (milk-sopped,
and walking like an Alderman
fed on too much turtle soup) by Dorothy (sister),
Mary (wife), and Sara (sister-in-law), and sometimes even another
Sarah (Coleridge’s wife, estranged!)
Wordsworth the Older
obtained a sinecure selling stamps,
wrote many bad poems,
lived a long, honorable life and,
truth is: he is immortal,
or as close as a corpse can get, would be
immortal for the first four stanzas of “Intimations”
alone. Those stanzas alone.
Anonymous—“Western Wind”—achieved the same with four lines!
No piece of art is perfect.
All it has to do is stay around
for two hundred, or five hundred,
or a few thousand
years. It (art) always changing; us,
not so much.

THE DRUNKEN FOREST
                   —for Ilya Kaminsky

When the permafrost
begins to melt
and all the trees lean
this way and another: Russians
call it a drunken forest.
A forest, in Russia,
usually means Siberia, the taiga,
and it was in Siberia,
in Vladivostok, a place in the pit
of a wind-stabbed continent’s tip,
on December 27, 1938,
Osip Mandelshtam died
(of cold, no food)
and did not die.

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© Copyright, 2012, Thomas Lux.
All rights reserved.