Happy Birthday, Laverne!

Today is Laverne Frith's birthday—our Laverne, who is a reknowned, award-winning Sacramento poet in addition to being co-editor of Ekphrasis, co-editor of Poetry Corner in Senior Magazine, past facilitator of the Sac. Poetry Center Hart Center Poetry Workshop, and the only poet in history to win the Grand Prize at the Dancing Poetry Festival twice. Wallace Stevens is probably Laverne's favorite poet, so let's have a little of that.


FLORAL DECORATIONS FOR BANANAS
—Wallace Stevens

Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do.
These insolent, linear peels
And sullen, hurricane shapes
Won't do with your eglantine.
They require something serpentine,
Blunt yellow in such a room!

You should have had plums tonight,
In an eighteenth-century dish,
And pettifogging buds,
For the women of primrose and purl,
Each one in her decent curl.
Good God! What a precious light!

But bananas hacked and hunched...
The table was set by an ogre,
His eye on an outdoor gloom
And a stiff and noxious place.
Pile the bananas on planks.
The women will be all shanks
And bangles and slatted eyes.

And deck the bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees,
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws,
Darting out of their purple craws,
Their spunky and tingling tongues.

_____________________

Okay, I confess I like the sly and spunky side of Stevens. Indulge me:


LAST LOOK AT THE LILACS
—Wallace Stevens

To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs,
O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks
And tell the divine ingenue, your companion,
That this bloom is the bloom of soap
And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?

Do you suppose that she cares a tick,
In this hymeneal air, what it is
That marries her innocence thus,
So that her nakedness is near,
Or that she will pause at scurrilous words?

Poor buffo! Look at the lavender
And look your last and look still steadily,
And say how it comes that you see
Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel
her body quivering in the Floreal

Toward the cool night and its fantastic star,
Prime paramour and belted paragon,
Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male,
Patron and imager of the gold Don John,
Who will embrace her before summer comes.

______________________


THE PALTRY NUDE STARTS ON A SPRING VOYAGE
—Wallace Stevens

But not on a shell, she starts,
Archaic, for the sea.
But on the first-found weed
She scuds the glitters,
Noiselessly, like one more wave.

She too is discontent
And would have purple stuff upon her arms,
Tired of the salty harbors,
Eager for the brine and bellowing
Of the high interiors of the sea.

The wind speeds her,
Blowing upon her hands
And watery back.
She touches the clouds, where she goes
In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

Yet this is meagre play
In the scurry and water-shine,
As her heels foam—
Not as when the goldener nude
Of a later day

Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,
In an intenser calm,
Scullion of fate,
Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,
Upon her irretrievable way.

______________________

She scuds the glitters and touches the clouds: sounds like my life (on a good day...). Stevens has a birthday coming up, too, on October 2.

And happy birthday again, Laverne! Be sure to sign up for the coming SPC Writers Conference October 7-8, where you can hear Laverne and his lovely wife, Carol, talk about the dos and don'ts of publishing. More about that later, or check www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org.

—Medusa

Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their poetry and announcements of Northern California poetry events to kathykieth@hotmail.com for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets.