ODE TO KARL SHAPIRO

By Leo Connellan

Along the Hudson and Westchester
the lone heterosexual rides his last maiden
into her screaming dawn.

From now on she'll be known as all knowing
liberated woman who doesn't give anything to you,
and doesn't want anything.

Your size means nothing to her and
what you can do with it, nothing and
it means very little to her if she does it,
and very little if she doesn't.

The city of New York is cracked. Where the moon rises
Karl Shapiro lands at Idlewild. Along Broadway
Jack Dempsey's is become th' home of th 'Whopper
and George M. Cohan finally looks ridiculous
in Pidgeon expression.

From the jungles of the South Pacific pulling
detail on Pacific isles, came home Karl Shapiro
with Bill Mauldin and Ernie Pyle, everybody's
cartoonist, everybody's drinking buddy correspondent,
and a poet who was in a war.

Karl Shapiro home like the Lion of Judah on
the pages of the New Yorker, put a pulitzer in
his pocket and to Chicago, edited, then
Japan, India, Germany, Nebraska...California.

Along the Hudson and Westchester the
highway broke apart and fell down on
pier scurrying thieves underneath.

The old west side trail crushed from
trucks, taxi cabs and motorists weaving
in and out in sudden death hurry.

Drenching the air in sweat and gas
while a thousand shady deals cost lives
and it cost your life to try and stay alive.

In the dawn moon the lone heterosexual
rides his last maiden singing "Hi-Ho
Blond Chick aw-waay!" and swinging Edsel
landed at Kennedy.

Karl Shapiro, I sing to you from my youth for
your great courage when you didn't have to and
it would have profited you more not to stand up
against the WASP and the FACIST.

But this will not be one-a' them revealing tributes,
in which I cry "This one, too, Karl, this one,
too, is a bisexual faggot under the skin!"...or
"Hey, Karl, bebbe, whachoo doin' down there
among th' Irish!?"

When this nobody came to you, you who were everything
embraced me. I have only imagined poems,
you, Karl, have written them.

What it was to read your images! Freeing us
from Whitman long before Allen told us it was
all right to tongue somebody's ear out, you wrote
"Buick" and "Nigger" while Federico saw
butterflies in Walt's beard and, excited,
a youngster, I wrote

TO BEGIN WITH

But my years now
in half seconds each squeezed for the utmost.
Defeated House Invalid's complete ceasing.
Fire the Pilot Light in the furnace of myself
like one kneeling outdoors on a windy night
Presses lips close to the new starting fire,
softly blows it to re-kindle where the spark had died.
And swimming in my head your "Buick," Karl, I wrote, then,

STAY LOOSE

When the rent man comes frothing into your pig-sty
eyes throwing you out, and the rat you've been sharing with
tip-toes cross door ledge behind him refusing to spring
bite into his roast beef fed neck that his face jutsj off
like a constipated owl as his drool hangs at the crevice
where a chin, somewhere in the rolls of greasy flesh should be,
ask him back. Be a host who's too busy to see a sick friend,
while his look pops disbelief as he can't catch his breath.
Push him back in that hall an animal would go blind in.

Gently slamming the door and bending, shove through
to his greedy little reach an envelope on which is scribbled,
small as a needle point...I'm moving...soon...soon.

Along the Hudson and Westchester
that road has broken off with us.

And downtown the chortling clowns
hustle us, Karl, out of our literature.

Second rate mediocrity arriving to read
what they call their "poems" on stages
like The New School, nasty mean people
always lugging knapsacks bent over like
the crawling things they are, struggling, not
about poetry but career, what will be bad
enough not threaten and so allowed.

There may be no Schliemann to find
the lost Troy of verse, Karl, and no
one who even knows Delmore Schwartz.
No one who reads Eberhart and Jarrell,
Allen's Kaddish or Federico
Watermelon poem or who ever
heard of the Naome Replansky.

But, Karl Shapiro, I sing to you for standing
for these people and these things. I sing
to you for myself because you gave me
myself in my art and you gave me yourself.

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