Best Poems - Gardening

Famous Women—Claudette Colbert* – Kathleen de Azevedo

“He was quite a guy how he laughed like oh what’s the name of the guy
He said dude he said babe he said dude he said babe
Just as a stork flew by
Like he knows which is which?

The treatment: Who’s to know which is which?

It was a warm Hollywood night
Tongue hanging warmth
The kinda warmth that makes asphalt turn into grainy black hair
The kind Claudette Colbert wore in oh what’s the name of the movie

The studio got him a dummy and oh what a dummy
Someone stuck Claudette Colbert into the trunk of his Olds
Really cruel people, the kind you don’t want to to meet
Stuck her in his trunk
Really cruel people played a trick on a starry-eyed kid
Initiated for the first time on the LA freeway
The entrances and exits and all the guys behind you laughing
Kinda makes you nervous

How about exploding palm trees!
How about the stork carrying newborn dudes and babes to Universal!
It kinda makes you nervous the first time out
Kinda like how it felt with oh what was the name of that girl

So away he went doing wheelies down the Santa Monica
This was the great love affair of the Western World
He and Claudette chugging on a steamy evening oh so steamy until
The back of the trunk burst into flames like palm trees
Kinda made him nervous

He pulled to the side and fanned the flames
But it was too hot, baby
So he started thumbing for a ride
Like Clark Gable in oh what’s the name of that—

It’s plastic now.
The back of the Olds, Claudette was plastic after all a plastic dummy
Kinda makes you nervous, huh?
Plasticky melted fleshy bubbly poly peptide urethane all over the 
chrome bumper sloppy on the license plate tail lights
A big plastic fleshy mess, the whole back of the Olds looks like
a big fleshy ass

Which is which?

What a sight for such a new boy in town
A faceless new boy new born
The stork carried him
Things like that always happen here
Never got real famous but close enough and at least he was happy
Not that we can tell which was which”

*[I’m sure the author of this poem must have known that Claudette Colbert was the first movie star to have a department store mannequin modeled after her, which adds further meaning to this offbeat poem. me]

A Publisher To His Client – Lord Byron

“Dear Doctor, I have read your play,
Which is a good one in its way,—
purges the eyes, and moves the bowels,
And drenches handkerchiefs like towels
With tears, that, in a flux of grief,
Afford hysterical relief
To shattered nerves and quickened pulses,
Which your catastrophe convulses.
I like your moral and machinery;
Your plot, too, has such scope for Scenery!
Your dialogue is apt and smart;
The play’s concoction full of art;
Your hero raves, your heroine cries,
All stab, and every body dies.
In short, your tragedy would be
The very thing to hear and see:
And for a piece of publication,
If I decline on this occasion,
It is not that I am not sensible
To merits in themselves ostensible,
But—and I grieve to speak it—plays
Are drugs—mere drugs, sir—now-a-days…
In short, Sir, what with one and t’other,
I dare not venture on another.
I write in haste; excuse each blunder;
The coaches through the street so thunder!…”

Hollywood – Karl Shapiro

“FARTHEST from any war, unique in time
Like Athens or Baghdad, this city lies
Between dry purple mountains and the sea.
The air is clear and famous, every day
Bright as a postcard, bringing bungalows
     And sights. The broad nights advertise
For love and music and astronomy.

Heart of a continent, the hearts converge
On open boulevards where palms are nursed
With flare-pots like a grove, on villa roads
Where castles cultivated like a style
Breed fabulous metaphors in foreign stone,
     And on enormous movie lots
Where history repeats its vivid blunders.

Alice and Cinderella are most real.
Here may the tourist, quite sincere at last,
Rest from his dream of travels. All is new,
No ruins claim his awe, and permanence,
Despised like customs, fails at every turn.
     Here where the eccentric thrives,
Laughter and love are leading industries.

Luck is another. Here the body-guard,
The parasite, the scholar are well paid,
The quack erects his alabaster office,
The moron and the genius are enshrined,
And the mystic makes a fortune quietly;
     Here all superlatives come true
And beauty is marketed like a basic food. 

O can we understand it? Is it ours,
A crude whim of a beginning people,
A private orgy in a secluded spot?
Or alien like the word, harem, or true
Like hideous Pittsburgh or depraved Atlanta?
     Is adolescence just as vile
As this its architecture and its talk?

Or are they parvenus, like boys and girls?
Or ours and happy, cleverest of all?
Yes. Yes. Though glamorous to the ignorant
This is the simplest city, a new school.
What is more nearly ours? If soul can mean
The civilization of the brain,
This is a soul, a possibly proud Florence.”