I am four years older than you but scarcely an unwobbling pivot. It was no fun sitting around being famous, was it? I'll never have to learn that lesson. You find a page torn out of a book and read it feeling that here you might find the mystery of print in such phrases as "summer was on the way" or "Gertrude regarded him somewhat quizzically." Your Sagane was a fraud. Love poems to girls you never met living in a country you never visited. I've been everywhere to no particular purpose. And am well past love but not love poems. I wanted to fall in love on the coast of Ecuador but the girls were itsy-bitsy and showers are not prominent in that area. Unlike Killarney where I also didn't fall in love the girls had good teeth. As in the movies the Latin girls proved to be spitfires with an endemic shanker problem. I didn't fall in love in Palm Beach or Paris. Or London. Or Leningrad. I wanted to fall in love at the ballet but my seat was too far back to see faces clearly. At Sadko a pretty girl was sitting with a general and did not exchange my glance. In Normandy I fell in love but had colitis and couldn't concentrate. She had a way of not paying any attention to me that could not be misunderstood. That is a year's love story. Except Key West where absolutely nothing happened with romantic overtones. Now you might understand why I drink and grow fat. When I reach three hundred pounds there will be no more love problems, only fat problems. Then I will write reams of love poems. And if she pats my back a cubic yard of fat will jiggle. Last night I drank a hundred-proof quart and looked at a photo of my sister. Ten years dead. Show me a single wound on earth that love has healed. I fed my dying dog a pound of beef and buried her happy in the barnyard. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...BEFORE A STATUE OF ACHILLES by GEORGE SANTAYANA SIX O'CLOCK by TRUMBULL STICKNEY THE DEATH OF THE OLD YEAR by ALFRED TENNYSON EMBLEMS OF LOVE: 22. 'TIS HONOURABLE TO BE LOVE'S MARTYR by PHILIP AYRES THE MAID VAR MY BRIDE by WILLIAM BARNES EPITAPH; INSCRIPTION FOR A MONUMENT ERECTED BY GENTLEMAN FOR HIS LADY by JAMES BEATTIE |