QotD: Favorite Poem

What is one of your favorite poems?
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.

I think I first read this on a bathroom stall at the Alpha Delta Phi house.

Homily
by Jim Harrison

These simple rules to live within — a black
pen at night, a gold pen in daylight,
avoid blue food and ten-ounce shots
of whiskey, don't point a gun at yourself,
don't snipe with the cri-cri-cri of a becasine,
don't use gas for starter fluid, don't read
dirty magazines in front of stewardesses —
it happens all the time; it's time to stop
cleaning your plate, forget the birthdays
of the dead, give all you can to the poor.
This might go on and on and will: who can
choose between the animal in the road
and the ditch? A magnum for lunch
is a little too much but not enough
for dinner. Polish the actual stars at night
as an invisible man pets a dog, an actual
man a memory-dog lost under
the morning glory trellis forty years ago.
Dance with yourself with all your heart
and soul, and occasionally others, but don't
eat all the berries birds eat or you'll die.
Kiss yourself in the mirror but don't fall in love
with photos of ladies in magazines. Don't fall
in love as if you were falling through
the floor in an abandoned house, or off
a dock at night, or down a crevasse
covered with false snow, a cow floundering
in quicksand while the other cows watch
without particular interest, backwards
off a crumbling cornice. Don't fall in love
with two at once. From the ceiling you can see
this circle of three, though one might be elsewhere.
He is rended, he rends himself, he dances,
he whirls so hard everything he is flies off.
He crumples as paper but rises daily from the dead.

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2 comments

  1. OMG: "Polish the actual stars at night as an invisible man pets a dog"Love it! How do you answer a QotD gone past — I wanna answer this one.Great poem.

  2. Find it using the back and forward arrows on the vox home page QoTD box, and then hit "answer". I think that should work.

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