Poems by Lou Gallo

 

Ezra Pound

Whew, just finished the Analects and Shih-ching,
his translations of Confucius, confusing all right,
now it’s back to The Cantos, which I love and hate,
hate most of them but every now and then, ah!

Then the crème de la crème—the collected
shorter poems, those faces embedded in boughs
and leaves.
But who can really explain Pound?

Those Mussolini broadcasts that got him
arrested for treason and confined to a cage
abord a ship bound for the USA
where he would spend years in an asylum
for the insane.

His re-wrote Eliot’s Wasteland
for which T.S acknowledged him
as “the better craftsman,” double-edged
compliment/insult as it was.

Best to keep him on the bookshelf
for a few stretches until you yearn again
for the insanity of genius
Or the genius of insanity—

and realize he knew more than you
will ever know and was probably saner.

 

Aristotle and me

When I found Aristotle loitering
in my back yard I leapt at the chance
to give him a piece of my mind.
He had cast shadows in my head
far too long, made me doubt my
beloved Plato in a most chronic way.
He was of course gazing at the one swallow
posted on a telephone wire, and
as I approached he started to mutter,
“One swallow does not—“
Oh, I cut him off grandly. “Forget
swallows!” I cried, “I’ve got bigger
birds to fry, forgive the cliché.”
“How have I offended thee, friend,”
he asked morosely.
“Well, for one thing you’ve destroyed
my passion for transcendence.
The entelechy business—essence inheres
within. I don’t like it, I crave absolutes,
meaning . . . you know, Plato’s dealies
up there yonder.”

He smiled and paused, touched his chin.
“Because the meat lies within
makes it no less absolute. Why set your sights
on vaporous cupcakes
when you can, er, have your cupcake
and eat it too?”

"And that awful Poetics. Only the hero,
the prince, the despot . . . you qualify
only them as tragic. What about my cousin
Roland whose liver turned to slush.
That’s just pathetic, you would say.”
Aristotle extended his hand--
“Friend, let us part way amicably.
I’m too old for fisticuffs. But I shall
send my pupil Alexander to settle the matter.”
“You see!” I cried as he faded from view,
Ideas live on while people die!
How tragic is that?”

What a predicament. Now I had to arm myself
against some crazed Macedonian.

 

Freud over for Supper

I was a little worried about this guest
what with all those hysterical Victorian maidens
and the wretched, acrid cigars
but my beautiful young wife and I decided
to go ahead with the invitation
and she cooked up a sumptuous German meal—
sauerbraten, roulade, kasespatzle, rote grutze,
oh, she went all out . . .
he looked pretty haggard when he arrived
in his professorial tweeds beclouded
in cigar smoke.

I asked him about the pain in his jaw.
“Oh, it killed me,” he said, “it always does.”
I asked if he really believed that consciousness
was a disease.
“Of course it is, a deflection, a wrong turn
in evolution.  It’s obvious.”
What about the meaning of life then,
you know, our purpose, our raison d’etre.
Freud shrugged, chuckled: “If you inquire
about the meaning of life you are sick.”
He kept his eyes on my wife and eventually
took her dainty hand—
“Let me psychoanalyze you, my dear,
you remind me of Anna O.”
She blushed and tried to slip her hand
out of his but he clutched her hard.

“So,” I tried to distract him, “which
the greater force, Eros or Thanatos?”
We noticed he hadn’t eaten a thing,
that the question alarmed him;
he puffed intently on his White Owl
and my wife and I could not stifle our coughs.
Eros and Thanatos, he growled,
are symbiotic, opposite sides of the same coin.
Eros thinks it can ward off the Beast
but it amounts to a mere ephemeral twitch.
He was on a roll:
“We lost paradise when we sublimated
polymorphous perversity into civilization
and its discontents.  There’s the expulsion
from the Garden, for you.  We sit here
and discuss philosophy as we dine on this
fine food instead of making love,
which is what we really want to do.”

He gazed directly into my wife’s blue eyes
and I knew she felt his allure.
But you haven’t touched the food,  I said,
after all of her hard work.
“I must bid you adieu, I’m afraid.  Jung
awaits me.  I believe he plans a revolt.
So thank you for your hospitality and,
my dear, the offer still holds.  I can cure you.”
Soon he hobbled out of the door
and we dumped the food on his plate
into the disposal.  It smelled like ashes.