Republished with permission of "The Wall Street Journal," July 16, 1993
#HumorousQuatrain
The Jacaranda in Spring (Near Rhyme) What discount art inspired this ta… Eleven months a year you’re quite… Too dark and gaunt, we thought, to…
A Sixtieth Anniversary: Oedipus… Attraction through the eye, the li… Portrays the blazing start of this… For years that magnetism did not w… Remained the stuff to move a sonne…
Gimme That Ole-Time Religion I As one New Yorker said, the guy w… You in New York, your wallet as h… At least has goals, unlike the oth… Who kill and maim and have no aim…
The Computer Cometh A shiny joint is rasped across the… And swiftly followed by a bulging… And other iridescent joints that h… Themselves across with creaks and…
At breakfast my microwave appears to heat, electrons clearly humming; container, though, remaining cold, oatmeal cooling rapidly.
Sex Education Concealed, disguised, deceptively… These mists are slowly cleared by… Across a playground, thrilling tru… Or theorized through older sibling…
Leda Lays an Egg One morning Leda, sitting on the… Saw Zeus appear transmogrified to… She heard too late the honks and w… And so with godly force he conquer…
Concealed, disguised, deceptively… These mists are slowly cleared by… Across a playground, thrilling tru… Or theorized through older sibling… Of differences beneath the corduro…
The Afghan women, dreading stones… don sacks of baggy black, concealing them from crown to sole… excepting narrow Brink-truck slots through which the men folk let the…
,The Honky-Poet Blues (With apologies to Bessie Smith) I’m sittin’ at my keyboard almos’… I say, I’m sittin’ at my keyboard… The wife want rent money,
The Star See that star that now appears To glisten in the sky? It took perhaps a million years For it to reach your eye.
Academic Editors I hate the callow ones who think t… And have therefore the right to cr… I hate the ones who charge me twen… So I can try to win a ten-buck pr…
Poets are, to most, myopic geeks, Effeminates with scarves and inch-… writing schmaltz with feathered qu… There are, it’s true, purveyors of… of teddy bears and valentines,
Argument from Design God’s antelopes have eyes placed f… And horizontal pupils, features th… Employ to see wide spans and speed… From lurking predators they’ve eas…
Suggest an early death deserves our envy, *Hardy wrote a book of short stories called “Life’s Little Ironies.” **Hardy was often cr...