The Scholar’s Trade
My old bonehead
too many years you thought
other than pithy gnomic,
what’s with the aorist in Hesiod?
The undefinable changes in grammars
analyzed over time along
the lazy denticulate reaches
of syntactical breaches?
What the hell was wrong with you?
My old braincase
benighted as Kafka’s paranoid beast,
barricaded the fort with books,
blind as a mole
to the pleasures and dangers
of the vivid world outside.
A different kind of blindness.
deliberate unseeing, looking off
what’s there laid out,
a kind of labored cane-tapping
serving no purpose but vanity.
You read and read,
misunderstood, learnt nothing
years years bring
more miscalculations, mistakes
a desert of labor and loneliness.
Far off, the footloose
boys and girls played,
the fountains sprayed water
on the shiny swimmers
laughing under the blazing standard
of the noonday sun.
You, where were you?
In a stiff collar,
cleric buried in some book
and nobody cared to dig you out.
You thought you solemnly sat
on a high hill, golden citadel,
back up in the tree of knowledge
reading, reading
with condemned Adam and Eve.
From their own earthly paradise
well east of the garden of Eden
satyrs entreated, pink-nippled
nymphs beckoned, presented
candid adorable underarms;
thrown grapes rained red
around your head
but drifting away on Homer’s sea,
alone in Oedipus’ white Colonus
lost, lost you fool
confounded confused
you fled to your books
and the world fled too,
lost, lost forever
before your day is over,
alas,
old hollow bonehead.
.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies. The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York.
.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 