240
THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
[Ciardi omitted reading the following stanza.]
In Saginaw, in Saginaw,
There's never a household fart,
For if it did occur,
It would blow the place apart,I met a woman who could break wind
And she is my sweet-heart.
O, I'm the genius of the world,Of that you can be sure,
But alas, alack, and me achin' back,
I'm often a drunken boor;
But when I die-and that won't be soonI'll sing with dear Tom Moore,
With that lovely man, Tom Moore.
Coda:
My father never used a stick,
He slapped me with his hand;
He was a Prussian through and through
And knew how to command;
I ran behind him every day
He walked our greenhouse land.
I saw a figure in a cloud,
A child upon her breast,
And it was 0, my mother O,
And she was half-undressed,
All women, 0, are beautiful
When they are half-undressed.
Now you see how he can start that kind of
rhyming, kidding thing and suddenly turn it
into another thing. I think that was characteristic of one part of his genius, and I'd like
to read you a poem I wrote about Roethke
called,
WAS A MAN
Ted Roethke was a tearing man,
a slam-bang wham-damn tantrum O
from Saginaw in Michigan
where the ladies sneeze at ten below
but any man that's half a man
can keep a sweat up till the freeze
gets down to ninety-nine degrees.
For the hair on their chests it hangs down
to their knees
in Saginaw, in Michigan.
Ted Roethke was a drinking man,
a brandy and a bubbly O.
He wore a roll of fat that ran
six times around his belly O,
then tucked back in where it began.
And every ounce of ever/ pound
JOHN CIARDI
The Morleys and the Burrows are
The aristocracy;
A likely thing for they're no worse
Than the likes of you or me,A picture window's one you can't
Raise up when you would pee.
In Shaginaw, in Shaginaw
I went to Shunday Shule;
The only thing I ever learned
Was called the Golden Rhule,But that's enough for any man
What's not a proper fool.
I took the pledge cards on my bike;
I helped out with the books;
The stingy members when they signed
Made with their stingy looks,The largest contributions came
From the town's biggest crooks.
0
