All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek

Tar and Feathers

Tar and Feathers Layton, we write our clabbered verses, Yours a long catalogue of curses, Mine one pure curse the song traverses— And yet the fact’s we both know what We’re cursing isn’t worth a futt. Old Ez advises “build a sewer” When culture’s gone into manure; Mistaking his advice at times We make a sewer of our rhymes. Of course, the Montrealers’ lives Are dismal—they deserve their wives— Of course the poems in the Star Are worse than yours and mine, by far. And Westmount’s cultured smell is spoil Refined from Point St. Charles’s oil. Sure what they read and what they think, And say, gives off an awful stink. The soda fountain “five-foot shelf” Would have choked Gutenberg himself; The stomach turns from what they feed Their young, like sparrows, true indeed. And yet, we itch to double-kill What there is left half-living still. Think of the mountain how it stands And doesn’t give a damn what cans, Cupcakes and condoms people throw Over its calm Shakespearean brow. There will be time yet, mountains think, To wash all cities down the sink. That’s how I’d like to stand at last, If lust or inspiration last. Here by the Fount of Youth, it’s warm, Coffee and pie need no reform, The waitress makes quick verses come. 36 / All These Roads Teenagers crowd around the rack Of sex and crime, but stay intact. To pin-ball magic eyeballs roll, The Farmby Program fills the soul, Telling the folks how many cows Were burned last night while chewing chows, Who had a birthday, who ate hash And died of piles in St. Eustache… And shall we curse the cook who makes The pink floss on the Pom-Pom cakes? Or bend to mop the floor with poems They’ll hang to drip in all good homes? Such choices still defeat our ends; It’s waste of time that passion spends, For dead men all know something worse Than still to be alive to curse! The young are coming, whistling songs, And we shall go like dinner gongs, But Montreal will have its fleas Though what you write “to teach and please” Is swelling notes for Ph.D.’s. The waitress asks me,“Something else, sir?” “No, thanks.” For this, no Bromo Seltzer. The Poetry of Louis Dudek / 37 ...