A Quibble with Dickinson
“Publication—is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man—”
For once you’re wrong, dear Emily.
Nobody pays for poetry.
Zucchetto (from A Curious Alphabet of Hats)
“Thou shalt not steal a pontiff’s hat,”
the Ten Commandments say.
But if you’d like to try and trade
that’s different—that’s OK!
Tradition tells that if you buy
a skullcap made in Rome
(zucchetto’s what they call it
in the land of Peter’s dome)
then elbow through the madding crowd
and set your face like steel,
and wave that white zucchetto
when you reach the Popemobile—
O democratic miracle!
a marvel, but it’s true:
you’ll find the very Pope himself
will doff his hat—to you!
Another Homeric Musing
Odyssey IX, trans. Lattimore
I wish that we had dined-and-dashed
and had our cheese for free,
instead of risking all our necks
on hospitality.
For when the Cyclops lumbered home
and trapped us in his cave,
it seemed we all were fated for
his gullet and the grave.
He seized two men and dashed their heads
and brains out on the stones,
then calmly dined upon their flesh
and picked his teeth with bones.
So take a new perspective from
this mythic tale of mine:
there’s something worse than dine-and-dash—
it’s called a dash-and-dine.