[lit-ideas] Re: SOMEDAY'S POEM
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 22:42:58 -0700
"Drowning in Plums"
Homage to P.G.Wodehouse, and my plum tree's current bounty.
(P.G. Wodehouse was, for reasons I don't know, known to intimates as
"Plum.")
It is the kind of Sunday night
in Bastille week
when fruit and politics weigh heavily on the twig,
when we all pause, as taught,
(by Aubrey Upjohn M.A.,
gauleiter of Malvern House, Bramley on Sea)
to reflect,
each in his own private way,
on what passes between the morning's b and e,
and the night's final tissue restorer.
When we consider what I believe Jeeves once called,
"this diurnal round"--
if "diurnal" is the word I want--
we come upon the one sure cure for grey hair,
an item, invented by a Frenchman,
called the guillotine.
Swiftly we move to more dire matters.
Jeeves is currently on holiday, shrimping.
I am drowning in plums.
"Large was his bounty," says the poet Gray.
Mine isn't merely large, it's muscular,
and it has a sudden flood of mutiny on its mind.
I have in my garden a tree that is built like Florence Cray's father,
but on a continental scale.
From it cometh plums in the morning, plums in the evening and plums in all
statutory hours between.
Short of stealing a ladder,
and, in dead of night,
falling on the tree like the wolf upon the fold,
I am stuck like the fretful porpentine,
without a spine,
floundering like a Fink Nottle
in worst prize-giving form.
Nature has gone soft in both tooth and claw
and blessed me with a surfeit of the raw.
Woe is me.
Les prunes de ma tante...
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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