What Edward Dahlberg Said About Conrad Aiken in 1953 in a Review in Poetry, Translated 59 Years Later

Barbie® rides into town on her Harley,

and oh my. but does that beast roar; 

it is like listening to Persephone’s howl,

it is like drinking from the well

of Pound’s personae when he takes classicism

by the horns and makes that flower

swell in a stewpot of tails and pipes and lutes

and echoes of a fascism

he is only beginning to love and abhor.

Ez is hacking his own Ulyssiad into so many cuts:

     Romanticism, Expressionism, Victorian Repressionism,

and Barbie®’s bike kicks its start to a stop

sign marked “Narcissism = Poet.”

Barbie® shakes the bugs out of her oil-sheened hair,

those wind-dreads too easily similie’d 

to a Medusa’s heads of helmetless

accidents along a boulder-strewn cliff,

one missed clutch between oblivion

and a philanthropic gift to the 

drift of extinctionism.

Barbie® in her leathered dons stilts her slightly

bent legs and her perfectly formed

jackhammer feet into the Don’t Miss Me Much Bar & Grill and 

orders a dozen light Valkyries 

and a Calliope Home Brew Dark Cider.  

She shoots the Valkyries 

with a steady eye, her size point five waist 

never swaying, and moseys onto the nearest stool

in a slightly reclined bent back position,

head tilted to the ceiling in case stars should break

out in a pin wheeled display

of astral anthropomorphic healing.

“What made you do it, Johnny,” she says, “why’d

you go and leave me so quietly?  What made

you think you mattered enough to matter?”

Conrad the achin’ bartender is looking around for

this Johnny cat but it’s only Ez dancing 

and the Valkyries talking, mixing the myths

with their hits at anonymity, harking the same

lonesome melaniecholy that all the po’ classicists throw 

like oracles to the fates.  What’s one more deaf glass god

of thunder with a wilted hammer?

Hearts break for less and more the pity to the way

the break causes the pen

to stammer its way along the page, the gate of

discontent which breeds genius.

Supposed.

Conrad’s boner for Edward won’t pause the dash

of pristine perfect plastic that Barbie®

opts to flash chugging back a rickety splash 

of cider before pulling herself back

to the bar, the crickle of like-leather unbent,

that sheen of plasticine vinyl,

back to the helmet, alee! afar! she straddles

out with a post up the ass

and a voiced concern about real men knowing

their place in the grander pantheon

of schemes.

She boots up the Harley and flummoxes back

out of town, leaving Conrad to his

doll’s burg, persistent, saying,

“I hate that Barbie® bitch! 

She always gets everything!”

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas.  All Rights Reserved