Deborah Bogen
I'm not a purist. It's never humor for humor's sake --- I'm always coping. Still, funny stuff does make me smile - and sometimes even laugh :) so I am grateful for it when it surfaces. MostlyI enjoy laughing at myself. What Nature Has to Teach Us is all about that. I have no business trying to be a jock at my age.
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Driving Home Trying Not to Change the Station
I’m listening to NPR and they’re interviewing
this guy, Steve Franklin, who’s talking
at us about sustainable ecological systems,
about inner city fish farms, about not invading
the wild eco-systems, about how with a little extra
effort and some duckweed we can avoid the need
for mid-western soybeans and Peruvian
abalone. Steve tells us about some real efficient
aqua-environments powered by human
waste and then he brings up vegetarian dog food
and listening to Steve I’m thinking:
Good People, Don’t Be So Dull.
Don’t be so unhip, you give Green Peace
a bad rap, the way you talk so slow,
the way you run for the chairmanship
of the committee, the way you’re always humming
the theme song from the Sound of Music.
Good people, don’t be so drab. I want to hear you
talk a little bad slang from 1958, give me a little daddio,
a little shubedoo, don’t make me think of words
like dandruff and cauliflower — check out
the Hassidim. At least they can dance.
Good people you give good works
a bad name in your LL Bean loose fit corduroy
jumpers, in your all-natural cotton sleepwear
and your double-soled hand-sewn moccasins from Maine.
I want to see you wear purple satin panties and go
to see a glass breaking, ass-shaking movie once a week.
My good people — put away the pledge cards and
admit it — Steve Franklin never gets a date.
Green waste. Brown waste. Grey waste don’t make
no rainbow. Can’t spin no color wheel.
Good people,
you are driving me to rock and roll.
What Nature Can Teach Us.
I am running up a path in Nature, so if this was a CD and not a poem you would hear a lot of Huff, Huff, Huff, which would distract you from the Beauty of Nature as I am distracted, lungs big as vacuum cleaner bags and my feet imprisoned in state-of-the-art foreign athletic footwear. What I can tell you is that the butterflies here look like Farfalle this year and that the boulder up ahead is overgrown with cornflowers, which are technically weeds but well-suited for disguising the boulder, which the path seems to think of as a birthmark from which, if it can, it will divert your attention. Around this next bend, and I know them all since this is the “oh-good-I-can-still-run-it” path I worship, is a stand of blue grass, which is not a term of art, but a really good description. I mean, each blade’s a straight blue straw of vegetation that looks out of place here, unnatural, as if the color on the TV needs adjustment. The other plants are heartless and gossip — like a field of murmuring tongues? — but their sound at least goes well with the creek, which has stumped me for a metaphor and so is looking Surly and Superior, and is probably thinking of itself as a small river, if you know what I mean. Up ahead, beyond the grass there’s a little bridge that looks just like that piece of dental equipment they have named after it and on the bridge are Natural Things that have fallen from great heights to lodge in crevices giving the bridge its au naturale flavor, and as I am looking to Nature for a lesson I have tried to cultivate an appreciation for its offerings, the desiccated bodies of grasshoppers and those softer things that roll up quickly if you touch them. But don’t you think that Nature is a bitch, really, unwilling to advise, to tell us about the lesson, never posting the syllabus or telling the class what will be on the final exam? So I am just as glad (and here the Huff, Huff thing begins to diminish) when I get to the bridge and can turn around and head back, can anticipate the pathetically soft and feeble knuckles of my landlord’s water-saving showerhead. And I am glad to remember as I run that coffee is made from Ground Nature, that Elements of Nature are in the very bean and designed by some greater power or other to produce Natural Effects. Thought e.g., and typing.
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Pittsburgh poet Deborah Bogen’s full-length collection, Landscape With Silos, was a 2004 National Poetry Series Finalist and won the 2005 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. An earlier chapbook was selected by Edward Hirsch as the 2002 ByLine Press Competition winner. Her poems and reviews appear widely in print journals (Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, Field, The Gettysburg Review) and online (Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, Poemeleon, Lafovea.) For the past eight years she’s run a free writing workshop in her Pittsburgh living room. You can visit her on the internet at www.DeborahBogen.net.