EMILY DICKINSON HAD THE WORST TASTE IN MEN
by Katha Pollitt
Page 12
I want to read a poem called a epistleanium, which is a hymn for a marriage or a poem for a marriage. This poem is/what I like about it is it's in saphix it's not a meter you see too much of. "Epistleanium". And it's for the wedding of two friends of mine.
The boy who scribbled
"Smash the state" in icing
on his wedding cake
has two kids and a co-op
reads, although pretends not to,
the Living section,
and hopes for tenure.
Everything's changed since we played
Capture the red flag, between Harvard Yard and the river.
Which of us dreamed that history,
who grinds men up like meat,
would make us her next meal?
But here we are
in a kind of post-imperial, permanent February,
with offices and apartments,
Faulk latecomers out of a Stendhal novel,
our brave ambitions run out into sand,
into resaurants and movies,
to lie at the Cape,
where the major source of amusement
is watching middle-aged Freudians
snub only younger Marxist historians.
And yet, if it's true,
as I've read, that the starving body eats itself,
it's true, too, it eats the heart last.
We've lost our moment of grandeur,
but, come on, admit it,
aren't we happier?
And so, let's welcome the child
already beginning, who'll laugh,
but not cruelly, I hope,
at our comfy nostalgias,
and praise, friends, praise
this marriage of friends and lovers
made in a dark time.
