Tell me first it’s a poem. Otherwise
I won’t know what is hitting my eyes.
You are so beautiful and I am a fool
to be in love with you
is a theme that keeps coming up
in songs and poems.
There seems to be no room for variation.
I have never heard anyone sing
I am so beautiful
and you are a fool to be in love with me.
I note Mr. Collins’ points one by one
Regarding love songs, and when he’s done,
With all his points agreeing,
He shifts to a nightclub, a singer named Johhny, a sax.
What exactly am I seeing?
Mr. Collins bravely states the facts.
For no particular reason this afternoon
I am listening to Johnny Hartman
whose dark voice can curl around
the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness
like no one else can.
It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette
someone left burning on a baby grand piano
around three o’ clock in the morning;
smoke that billows up into the bright lights
while out there in the darkness
some of the beautiful fools have gathered
around little tables to listen,
some with their eyes closed,
others leaning forward into the music
as if it were holding them up,
or twirling the loose ice in a glass,
slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.
The Iowa Workshop with her beautiful fools
Revolutionizes poetry in the schools
As Mr. Collins makes us feel
The beautiful fools are beautiful and real.
Tell me first it’s a poem. Otherwise
I won’t know what is hitting my eyes.
So it’s a poem, after all, one of those
Which is, let’s face it, prose,
But it’s too late. Music is lost in the word.
Prose that wants to be a poem is absurd.
Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,
borne beyond midnight,
that has no desire to go home,
especially now when everyone in the room
is watching the large man with the tenor sax
that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.
He moves forward to the edge of the stage
and hands the instrument down to me
and nods that I should play.
So I put the mouthpiece to my lips
and blow into it with all my living breath.
The Iowa workshop poem sure can wail.
The beautiful fool has me, and will not fail.
The prose is blowing golden sequences that seem
The innumerable flickering sequences of a dream.
The humanities! The curricula! The school!
Mr. Collins is wise! Too wise to circumvent the fool.
We are all so foolish,
my long bebop solo begins by saying,
so damn foolish
we have become beautiful without even
knowing it.
And so the Iowa effort ends.
Midnight. All the little tables are friends.
We read prose without knowing it’s prose.
A fool picks up the tenor sax. And blows.