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children hungered
    while their mothers cried. But what he spoke of
    (it cannot be denied) he spoke of sweetly
    and he never falsified. With all good cheer
    he took his limitation, and never risked
    his pen on any side. His silence was
    the bulk of his creation: he held his tongue
    too much, perhaps, but then, he never lied.
    II.
    By birth, upbringing, inclination,
    he made his task the mastery of words,
    became the spokesman for his generation,
    and reaped from that the double-edged rewards.
    Through two world wars he railed against the lie
    that bloodshed ever serves a noble cause,
    saw anarchy invade, and made reply,
    by praising order, harmony and law.
    Likewise when famine struck, when children died,
    when innocents were sentenced without trial,
    he always let his conscience be his guide—
    though critics claimed it much impaired his style.
    Throughout a long career of writing verse,
    he often changed his mind; men have the right:
    exchanged his benedictions for a curse,
    transformed his politics from left to right.
    Although his prophet’s cape did not quite fit,
    although he made mistakes because he dared,
    he chronicled his age with biting wit,
    and though he did not change the world, he cared.
    III.
    He had no complex notion of aesthetics.
    He liked his food well-spiced, his women fair;
    he had a kind of passion for athletics,
    and at the age of sixty, all his hair.
    He worshipped music and he liked to drink,
    was fond of travel, company, long walks;
    he could not bear to be alone to think,
    and best of all, he dearly loved to talk.
    It’s doubtful how he chose his occupation;
    he thought that routine work was Adam’s curse.
    He had some money, and a talent for narration
    and one day tried his hand at writing verse.
    His ear for words was almost never wrong;
    he liked applause and reveled in his fame.
    Whatever crossed his mind became a song,
    and yet he half-conceived his craft a game.
    In all his poems there seemed to be the hint
    that had his stay on earth been better timed,
    he would have rushed to battle, not to print,
    but since there was no Troy to fight, he rhymed.

III
FROM
Fruits & Vegetables
(1971)

Fruits & Vegetables
    1
    Goodbye, he waved, entering the apple.
    That red siren,
    whose white flesh turns brown
    with prolonged exposure to air,
    opened her perfect cheeks to receive him.
    She took him in.
    The garden revolved
    in her glossy patinas of skin.
    Goodbye.
    2
    O note the two round holes in onion.
    3
    Did I tell you about
    my mother’s avocado?
    She grew it from a pit.
    Secretly, slowly in the dark,
    it put out grub-white roots
    which filled a jelly jar.
    From this unlikely start,
    an avocado tree with bark
    & dark green leaves
    shaded the green silk couch
    which shaded me
    throughout my shady adolescence.
    There, beneath that tree
    my skirt gave birth to hands!
    Oh memorable hands of boys
    with blacked-out eyes
    like culprits
    in the National Enquirer.
    My mother nursed that tree
    like all her children,
    turned it around so often
    towards the sun
    that its trunk grew twisted
    as an old riverbed,
    & despite its gaudy leaves
    it never bore
    fruit.
    4
    Cantaloupes: the setting sun at Paestum
    slashed by rosy columns.
    5
    I am thinking of the onion again, with its two O mouths, like the gaping holes in nobody. Of the outer skin, pinkish brown, peeled to reveal a greenish sphere, bald as a dead planet, glib as glass, & an odor almost animal. I consider its ability to draw tears, its capacity for self-scrutiny, flaying itself away, layer on layer, in search of its heart which is simply another region of skin, but deeper & greener. I remember Peer Gynt. I consider its sometimes double heart. Then I think of despair when the onion searches its soul & finds only its various skins; & I think of the dried tuft of roots leading nowhere & the parched umbilicus, lopped off in the garden. Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest,