[lit-ideas] Re: Tuesday Poem, Written on Friday Night
- From: Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:32:40 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
-----Original Message-----
From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Aug 24, 2004 8:54 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Tuesday Poem, Written on Friday Night
I have been off, cavorting with cousins, psychologists in Roseburg, which is
a logging town in Southern Oregon.
My other SAAB broke, so in Teemu's terms
I found myself stranded without an ideology. Fortunately they had a spare
Subaru, which makes me, well I don't know what.
On Saturday, after the Highland Games, we were invited to a Skunk skank. A
couple had been away on a European vacation and found, on their return, that
a skunk had used the cat door to access cat food, also their furniture. He
had used the latter for the skunk equivalent of skeet shooting. The
challenge before the skank was to come up with a poem about the incident.
Here's mine:
Skunked, the Psychological Perspective
The error, if error there was, may have been--who knows?--
maybe not in a famous "failure to communicate"
but in insufficiently making the problem yours,
in failing, as they say, to "own" it.
Your humble zorrino, polecat or skunk,
when breaking and entering,
when skittering indoors with malice aforethought,
when scattering gobs of chaos on every floor,
says Encyclopedia Britannica,
will do handstands or stomp its feet
before the anal glands come into play.
Was there any report of handstands?
Or foot stomping?
Perhaps not?
Further into Britannica's entry lies an all in important addendum,
an "ah-ha" moment.
The polecat, zorrino, or any other member of the skunk family--
did you know that some of them are spotted?--
may have wanted no more or less,
than to give up his smash-and-grab ways,
to abandon the abandon of the wild,
and become a household pet;
it may, in its own misunderstood way,
have been applying for domestic asylum.
Some pets you have to walk.
With fish, one cleans filters and repositions weeds:
location, location, location.
With pigs one eases by stages into the herding of sheep.
But with your cuddly skunk, the encyclopedia says,
you gotta learn
only one essential skill:
the heavy lifting of stink.
To prospective skunk owners,
Britannica offers tips on "odour" removal.
Unfortunately, to learn exactly how this is achieved,
to get the full skinny on destinking,
you've gotta subscribe to the site.
Maybe some here might think,
in this instance,
that what we have not, we ought to prize?
So it's a bit of a long shot,
a wild spray in the dark,
but I'm wondering if,
next time you find in your abode a small or large skunk,
handstanding, grandstanding, even glandstanding,
you'll look upon the behavior
in all its feral splendor,
as a stinking great plea for love?
A.A. I'm curious, do you find yourself watching what you say when you're with
your cousins?
Andy Amago
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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