One’s mail is often full of the
most dreadful stuff—junk, of course, bills, and I’m lucky enough to have almost
totally avoided courts and lawyers in my life so far, but I’ve heard they can
fill the box with some pretty dreadful business too. The first stanza is a
confessional list of the kind of crap that arrives in the mailbox, and it’s
ironic and funny. “his insurance firms / are rich with info enigmatic.” This is
followed by a wish that the mail would come three or four times a day, like it
used to do in pre-telephone London and Paris, and still did (apparently) in
Togo in the 1960s, and did in his boyhood Oklahoma. Is this ironic? Oh yes.
Then the poem ends with this: “I dote on my mail: I need its bung: / and the
postman may indeed follow the moon and the sun / but believe me he fellows not
Henry.” “Bung” is the hole in the side of a barrel, and the other actual
definition that follows from the first—the anus—is
pretty clearly the one B. is referring to. Then the pun on “follows” and “fellows”.
The guy is not happy with his mail, and the whole thing is pretty funny in the typical
bitter mode of The Dream Songs.
I’ve referred only on occasion to
my student poems from back in college days, because this for the most part is
meant to be a creative and forward-looking project, but this one is so apt, and
it’s one of my favorites from back in the day, that I think I’ll go ahead and
share it. From an undergraduate Creative Writing Workshop, probably about 1984,
Don Bogen the professor, and I remember that he liked it a lot. I remember deliberately
choosing flat diction and flat, end-stopped lines. I was living at the time in
a barnlike Victorian shotgun with a tottering chimney, and I was dreading the
mail.
Old
Chimney
Crumbs of soft mortar and brick
bits
litter the walk beneath the old
chimney.
It drops pieces with each January
rain,
and might fall in a stiff wind.
Trickles of decayed powder,
light on sleeping cats.
The mailman brings bad news
and leaves cold footprints in orange dust.
KZ
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