Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker
Page 54
Not me,
I’m a bee.
On a day that’s fair with a wind that’s free,
Any old drone is the lad for me.
I have no flair for love moderne,
It’s far too studied, far too stern,
I’m just a bee—I’m wild, I’m free,
That’s me.
I can’t afford to be too choosy;
In every queen there’s a touch of floozy,
And it’s simply rare
In the upper air
And I wish to state
That I’ll always mate
With whatever drone I encounter.
Man is a fool for the latest movement,
He broods and broods on race improvement;
What boots it to improve a bee
If it means the end of ecstasy?
(He ought to be there
On a day that’s fair,
Oh, it’s simply rare
For a bee.)
Man’s so wise he is growing foolish,
Some of his schemes are downright ghoulish
He owns a bomb that’ll end creation
And he wants to change the sex relation,
He thinks that love is a handicap,
He’s a fuddydud, he’s a simple sap;
Man is a meddler, man’s a boob,
He looks for love in the depths of a tube,
His restless mind is forever ranging,
He thinks he’s advancing as long as he’s changing
He cracks the atom, he racks his skull,
Man is meddlesome, man is dull,
Man is busy instead of idle,
Man is alarmingly suicidal,
Me, I’m a bee.
I am a bee and I simply love it,
I am a bee and I’m darned glad of it,
I am a bee, I know about love:
You go upstairs, you go above,
You do not pause to dine or sup,
The sky won’t wait—it’s a long trip up;
You rise, you soar, you take the blue,
It’s you and me, kid, me and you,
It’s everything, it’s the nearest drone,
It’s never a thing that you find alone.
I’m a bee,
I’m free.
If any old farmer can keep and hive me,
Then any old drone may catch and wive me;
I’m sorry for creatures who cannot pair
On a gorgeous day in the upper air,
I’m sorry for cows who have to boast
Of affairs they’ve had by parcel post,
I’m sorry for man with his plots and guile,
His test-tube manner, his test-tube smile;
I’ll multiply and I’ll increase
As I always have—by mere caprice;
For I am a queen and I am a bee,
I’m devil-may-care and I’m fancy-free,
Love-in-air is the thing for me,
Oh, it’s simply rare
In the beautiful air,
And I wish to state
That I’ll always mate
With whatever drone I encounter.
1945
DOROTHY PARKER
RHYME OF AN INVOLUNTARY VIOLET
When I ponder lovely ladies
Slipping sweetly down to Hades,
Hung and draped with glittering booty—
Am I distant, cold and snooty?
Though I know the price their pearls are
Am I holier than the girls are?
Though they’re lavish with their “Yes’s,”
Do I point, and shake my tresses?
No! I’m filled with awe and wonder.
I review my every blunder. . . .
Do I have the skill to tease a
Guy for an Hispano-Suiza?
I can’t even get me taxis
Off of Sydneys, Abes, and Maxies!
Do the pretty things I utter
To the kings of eggs and butter
Gain me pearls as big as boulders,
Clattering, clanking round my shoulders,
Advertising, thus, their full worth?
No, my dear. Mine come from Woolworth.
Does my smile across a table
Win a cloak of Russian sable?
Baby, no. I’d have to kill a
Man to get a near-chinchilla.
Men that come on for conventions
Show me brotherly attentions;
Though my glance be fond and melting,
Do they ever start unbelting
With the gifts they give the others?
No! They tell me of their mothers,
To the baby’s pictures treat me,
Say they want the wife to meet me!
Gladly I’d be led to slaughter
Where the ermine flows like water,
Where the gay white globes are lighted;
But I’ve never been invited!
So my summary, in fact, is
What an awful flop my act is!
1926
FULFILMENT
For this my mother wrapped me warm,
And called me home against the storm,
And coaxed my infant nights to quiet,
And gave me roughage in my diet,
And tucked me in my bed at eight,
And clipped my hair, and marked my weight,
And watched me as I sat and stood:
That I might grow to womanhood
To hear a whistle, and drop my wits,
And break my heart to clattering bits.
1927
BOHEMIA
Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
Playwrights and poets and such horses’ necks
Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.
Diarists, critics, and similar roe
Never say nothing, and never say no.
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man who solicits insurance!
1927
DON MARQUIS
MOTHER’S HOME AGAIN!
’Twas on the Eve of Christmas
A face against the pane
Peered in at the firelight;
’Twas worn with vice, and plain;
But all the children shouted:
“Mother’s home again!”
1953
PETER DE VRIES
THEME AND VARIATION
Coleridge caused his wife unrest,
Liking other company best;
Dickens, never quite enthralled,
Sent his packing when she palled;
Gauguin broke the marriage vow
In quest of Paradise enow.
These things attest in monochrome:
Genius is the scourge of home.
Lady Nelson made the best of
What another took the rest of;
Wagner had, in middle life,
Three children by another’s wife;
Whitman liked to play the dastard,
Boasting here and there a bastard.
Lives of great men all remind us
Not to let their labors blind us.
Each helped to give an age its tone,
Though never acting quite his own.
Will of neither wax nor iron
Could have made a go with Byron;
Flaubert, to prove he was above
Bourgeois criteria of love,
Once took a courtesan to bed
Keeping his hat upon his head.
But mine is off to Johann Bach,
For whom my sentiment is “Ach!”
Not once, but twice, a model spouse,
With twenty children in the house.
Some fathers would have walked away
In what they call a fugue today;
But he left no one in the lurch,
&n
bsp; And played the stuff he wrote in church.
1950
W. H. AUDEN
PEOPLE
Fulke Greville
Wrote beautifully at sea level;
With each rising contour his verse
Grew progressively worse.
It was impossible to inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Into offering the slightest apology
For his Phenomenology.
Historians have tried to widen
Our conception of John of Leiden,
But the term Anabaptist
Remains aptest.
When the young Kant
Was told to kiss his aunt,
He obeyed the Categorical Must,
But only just.
Joseph Lister
Never worried his sister
By becoming an alcoholic;
His vice was carbolic.
Longinus
Was one of those unpunctual diners;
He always knew what the Sublime was,
But never what the time was.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Had the habit as a teacher
Of cracking his joints
To emphasize his points.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Wept into his daiquiri
When he heard St. John’s Wood
Thought he was no good.
Paul Valéry
Earned a meagre salary
Walking in the Bois,
Observing his Moi.
1953
DONALD HALL
SIX POETS IN SEARCH OF A LAWYER
0;Finesse be first, whose elegance deplores
All things save beauty, and the swinging doors;
Whose cleverness in writing verse is just
Exceeded by his lack of taste and lust;
Who lives off lady lovers of his verse
And thanks them by departing with their purse;
Who writes his verse in order to amaze,
To win the Pulitzer, or Time’s sweet praise;
Who will endure a moment, and then pass,
As hopeless as an olive in his glass.
Dullard be second, as he always will,
From lack of brains as well as lack of skill.
Expert in some, and dilettante in all
The ways of making poems gasp and fall,
He teaches at a junior college where
He’s recognized as Homer’s son and heir.
Respectable, brown-suited, it is he
Who represents on forums poetry,
And argues to protect the libelled Muse,
Who’d tear his flimsy tongue out, could she choose.
His opposite is anarchistic Bomb,
Who writes a manifesto with aplomb.
Revolt! Revolt! No matter why or when,
It’s novelty—old novelty again.
Yet Bomb, if read intently, may reveal
A talent not to murder but to steal:
First from old Gone, whose fragmentary style
Disguised his sawdust Keats a little while;
And now from one who writes at very best
What ne’er was thought and much the less expressed.
Lucre be next, who takes to poetry
The businessman he swore he would not be.
Anthologies and lecture tours and grants
Create a solvency that disenchants.
He writes his poems, now, to suit his purse,
Short-lined and windy, and reserves his curse
For all the little magazines so fine
That offer only fifty cents a line.
He makes his money, certainly, to write,
But writes for money. Such is appetite.
Of Mucker will I tell, who tries to show
He is a kind of poet men don’t know.
To shadowbox at literary teas,
And every girl at Bennington to seize,
To talk of baseball rather than of Yeats,
To drink straight whiskey while the bard creates—
This is his pose, and so his poems seem
Incongruous in proving life a dream.
Some say, with Freud, that Mucker has a reason
For acting virile in and out of season.
Scoundrel be last. Be deaf, be dumb, be blind,
Who writes satiric verses on his kind.
1955
ROBERT GRAVES
THE NAKED AND THE NUDE
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.
The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping, by a showman’s trick,
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.
The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat,
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!
1957
gooseneck lamp As you all know, tonight is the night of the full moon, half the world over. But here the moon seems to hang motionless in the sky. It gives very little light; it could be dead. Visibility is poor. Nevertheless, we shall try to give you some idea of the lay of the land and the present situation.
typewriter The escarpment that rises abruptly from the central plain is in heavy shadow, but the elaborate terracing of its southern glacis gleams faintly in the dim light, like fish scales. What endless labor those small, peculiarly shaped terraces represent! And yet, on them the welfare of this tiny principality depends.
pile of mss. A slight landslide occurred in the northwest about an hour ago. The exposed soil appears to be of poor quality: almost white, calcareous, and shaly. There are believed to have been no casualties.
typed sheet Almost due north, our aerial reconnaissance reports the discovery of a large rectangular “field,” hitherto unknown to us, obviously man-made. It is dark-speckled. An airstrip? A cemetery?
envelopes In this small, backward country, one of the most backward left in the world today, communications are crude and “industrialization” and its products almost nonexistent. Strange to say, however, signboards are on a truly gigantic scale.
ink-bottle We have also received reports of a mysterious, oddly shaped, black structure, at an undisclosed distance to the east. Its presence was revealed only because its highly polished surface catches such feeble moonlight as prevails. The natural resources of the country being far from completely known to us, there is the possibility that this may be, or may contain, some powerful and terrifying “secret weapon.” On the other hand, given what we do know, or have learned from our anthropologists and sociologists about this people, it may well be nothing more than a numen, or a great altar recently erected to one of their gods, to which, in their present historical state of superstition and helplessness, they attribute magical powers, and may even regard as a “savior,” one last hope of rescue from their grave difficulties.
typewriter eraser At last! One of the elusive natives has been spotted! He appears to be—rather, to have been—a unicyclist-courier, who may have met his end by falling from the height of the escarpment because of the deceptive illumination. Alive, he would have been small, but undoubtedly proud and erect, with the thick, bristling black hair typical of the indigenes.
ashtray From our superior vantage poin
t, we can clearly see into a sort of dugout, possibly a shell crater, a “nest” of soldiers. They lie heaped together, wearing the camouflage “battle dress” intended for “winter warfare.” They are in hideously contorted positions, all dead. We can make out at least eight bodies. These uniforms were designed to be used in guerrilla warfare on the country’s one snow-covered mountain peak. The fact that these poor soldiers are wearing them here, on the plain, gives further proof, if proof were necessary, either of the childishness and hopeless impracticality of this inscrutable people, our opponents, or of the sad corruption of their leaders.
1973
ELIZABETH BISHOP
12 O’CLOCK NEWS
CALVIN TRILLIN
CHRISTMAS IN QATAR
(A NEW HOLIDAY CLASSIC, FOR THOSE TIRING OF “WHITE CHRISTMAS” AND “JINGLE BELLS”)
VERSE:
The shopping starts, and every store’s a zoo.
I’m frantic, too: I haven’t got a clue
Of what to get for Dad, who’s got no hobby,
Or why Aunt Jane, who’s shaped like a kohlrabi,
Wants frilly sweater sets, or where I’ll find
A tie my loudmouthed Uncle Jack won’t mind.
A shopper’s told it’s vital he prevails:
Prosperity depends on Christmas sales.
“Can’t stop to talk,” I say. “No time. Can’t halt.
Economy could fail. Would be my fault.”
CHORUS:
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Qatar,
Or someplace else that Santa won’t find handy.
Qatar will do, although, Lord knows, it’s sandy.
I need to get to someplace pretty far.
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Qatar.
VERSE:
Young Cousin Ned, his presents on his knees,