A collection by Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall
Shakespeare, Venus, and the Travelling Salesman
Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 19
Dear Will,
About your obsession with mortality:
Transitions and death are essentials in life
And we must face the obsequies of ashes or earth
But there are other topics upon which to write
Let us not consider funerals today
Let us sit upon the lawn and smoke our pipes
And write about new leaves on ancient oaks
(You’ll pen far better lines; you always do)
Today we’ll ignore our own mortality
And tell inappropriate jokes about Venus
and a travelling salesman
Avon Man and the Mystery of His First-Best Bed
I gyve unto my wief my second best bed… -Attributed to Shakespeare in his will.
That second-best bed doesn’t matter a pop
Those anyones whoever slept in it are deads
Memorialized as dashboard bobbleheads
At Ye Olde Anne Hathawaye gifte shoppe
Kinge Richarde nevere cryede, “mye kyngdome fore ye bedde!”
Yea, goode olde Sirre Erpinghame joked, “Now lye I like a kynge”
So what’s the deale withe the firste-beste bedde thynge?
Thatte seconde bedde is where the Widowe rested hir hedde
Ande thusse ye scholares maken withouten cessatione
Unsupportede argumentes and allegationes
Li Po Writes to us from his Mountain
Li Po, “Ancient Air,” p. 84, A Book of Luminous Things, ed. Czeslaw Milosz
We read of the poets of China
In the days of the Golden Tang
In the time of The Gathering of Kings
When The Silk Road carried dreams
Government officials were the poets
And poets were the government officials
Who knew The Five Classics by heart
And wrote of China in Tang quatrains
They were writing to the Emperor
And now they are writing to us
On Reading a Poem by Du Mu
Everything is far away
China is ever so far away
The dynasties are far away
A golden dragon might fly us there
The moon is across the river
The blue-black river in the mist
A fishing boat is tied to the gate
The water-gate of our inn
What do they mean, the moon and boat?
Maybe the moon and the boat mean nothing
They simply are; they are themselves
Or perhaps we mean the moon and boat
Because of Du Mu and his words
The moon and the boat are forever
The blue-black river is forever
In reading of them so are we
“A Night at the Inn While Travelling”, Three Hundred Tang Poems, Translated by Peter Harris; London: Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2009
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