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Frederick Lord
Frederick (Rick) Lord is the
Assistant Dean of Liberal Arts
at Southern New Hampshire
University, where he also
teaches English and serves as
a poetry editor for Amoskeag,
SNHU’s literary magazine. A
collection of his poetry, What
I Made Instead of a Life, was
published in 1996. He and his
wife Heather, a painter, live
in Bow, N. H.
Assistant Dean of Liberal Arts
at Southern New Hampshire
University, where he also
teaches English and serves as
a poetry editor for Amoskeag,
SNHU’s literary magazine. A
collection of his poetry, What
I Made Instead of a Life, was
published in 1996. He and his
wife Heather, a painter, live
in Bow, N. H.
The Novel I Never Did Write About Us
In the novel I never did write about us (The great bildungsroman
I started in bed the night after you festooned me with calamari
and marinara sauce and storm-trooped out of the pseudo-Italian
restaurant into the very real rain, and I had run out after you the wrong way,
a scene from one of those godawful movies we used to watch
on your parents’ scratchy couch while I ambitiously felt you up);
in my pale pastiche of Lawrence and Salinger and Maugham,
cannibalizing your letters (Those cheerful treacheries written
on colored paper with colored ink, each letter i dotted with a little heart),
and the tortured imitation Yeats I wrote to you every day,
the girl is Maud Gonne beautiful, a blond revolution all by herself,
and the boy is as earnest as a first volume of verse, and even thinner.
They meet. In fact, they actually collide. She knocks him out
--I mean, literally knocks him unconscious-- when he’s running
after a pickpocket who’s stolen a sonnet, the only thing in his wallet,
and she’s crossing the street to throw out her old boyfriend’s work boots.
He comes-to in her arms, immortally uninjured, felled by Love,
with a violinist playing behind every dumpster, kiosk, and tree.
Recklessly they make love-lust: in the dark corner booths of all-night diners,
in the back of lurching interstate buses, in the unguarded broom closets
of small town libraries, and once, during a thunderstorm, on a jungle gym.
Everything happens to them by designed chance, undeserved magic.
Broke, they buy a book of Baudelaire for a quarter and find
a twenty dollar bill between two poems of utter chic despair.
It’s almost sickening how happy they are, we were. In the novel I
always promised to write, but never could think of a decent title for,
when they find they’ve been living another couple’s fiction,
he doesn’t blame her for never being what she never was.
He is only a partial idiot, maybe even a proto-human being.
We are not so clearly better off without each other’s illusions.
No: In a sappy dénouement that would have snapped Willy’s
Suspenders of Disbelief, the young couple meet in a coffee shop,
where a bald, bug-eyed poet reads them a poem about Time as the river
that smoothes the roughest stone, that Patience is Love’s other name. It’s
such sweet, touching, sincere, poetic, evocative, honest, heart-felt, winsome
junk, crap, unmitigated flapdoodle, sophomoronic maundering, derivative drivel.
Even if I hadn’t burned those letters and given those notebooks away,
it never had a glimmer of a crumb of a prayer of a chance of a hope of working,
the novel I never did, never could, never would, never dared, write about us.
Dissecting the Unicorn.pdf
Welcome to the Mediated Pro Se Divorce Workbook.
From the drop-down menu, select the number
of nights you failed to give a damn.
Consult the Guilt Index for the hours
required in self-recrimination.
Now multiply by the Self-Pity Factor
and add to the Sorrow Constant.
Please take your time. Be as thorough as possible.
Everything must be paid for.
Under “Opportunity Cost,“ describe
the house you’ll never buy, the child you’ll never have.
Inventory all enchanted community property--
the mattress on which you flew,
the telekinetic teakettle
which boiled whenever you thought it should.
Note: even by mutual consent, phrases and household items
used as projectiles cannot be taken back.
There are Extended Depression Penalties for avoidance and wrong answers.
Everything must be accounted for.
Right click on all hopes and disappointments shared,
times you suffered or rejoiced in each other.
Please check your answers. This is essential for closure,
which is essential for healing, which is essential.
Remember to hit “Submit” when you have finished.
Everything must be grieved for.
Meaning-Making Animals
On our backs up in Haller’s field,
we conjured panthers out of clouds:
“See that part, nearest the sun?
That’s his nose. See it? See it?”
“No. Where, did you say?”
“There, you dodo. Right there.”
“Ohhhh…..…yeah.”
We need to know why lightning strikes the isolated tree;
not to play on hilltop fields when clouds grow dark, articulate;
understand to eat us a panther’s purpose is;
And in Earth’s longest afternoon,
those who learned to play Cause-and-Effect
as well as Hide-and-Seek
lived to teach it to their kids, and they to theirs.
Now the devil Darwin makes us do it,
makes us manufacture meaning
from raw coincidence.
Unreasonable trains derail,
careless friends get cancer,
thoughtless toddlers drown in wading pools
--the abstract art of accident
shaped into personal narrative,
dragging purpose clear from the hissing wreck,
blaming celluar insanity on the body politic,
draining design from little lungs.
In the novel I never did write about us (The great bildungsroman
I started in bed the night after you festooned me with calamari
and marinara sauce and storm-trooped out of the pseudo-Italian
restaurant into the very real rain, and I had run out after you the wrong way,
a scene from one of those godawful movies we used to watch
on your parents’ scratchy couch while I ambitiously felt you up);
in my pale pastiche of Lawrence and Salinger and Maugham,
cannibalizing your letters (Those cheerful treacheries written
on colored paper with colored ink, each letter i dotted with a little heart),
and the tortured imitation Yeats I wrote to you every day,
the girl is Maud Gonne beautiful, a blond revolution all by herself,
and the boy is as earnest as a first volume of verse, and even thinner.
They meet. In fact, they actually collide. She knocks him out
--I mean, literally knocks him unconscious-- when he’s running
after a pickpocket who’s stolen a sonnet, the only thing in his wallet,
and she’s crossing the street to throw out her old boyfriend’s work boots.
He comes-to in her arms, immortally uninjured, felled by Love,
with a violinist playing behind every dumpster, kiosk, and tree.
Recklessly they make love-lust: in the dark corner booths of all-night diners,
in the back of lurching interstate buses, in the unguarded broom closets
of small town libraries, and once, during a thunderstorm, on a jungle gym.
Everything happens to them by designed chance, undeserved magic.
Broke, they buy a book of Baudelaire for a quarter and find
a twenty dollar bill between two poems of utter chic despair.
It’s almost sickening how happy they are, we were. In the novel I
always promised to write, but never could think of a decent title for,
when they find they’ve been living another couple’s fiction,
he doesn’t blame her for never being what she never was.
He is only a partial idiot, maybe even a proto-human being.
We are not so clearly better off without each other’s illusions.
No: In a sappy dénouement that would have snapped Willy’s
Suspenders of Disbelief, the young couple meet in a coffee shop,
where a bald, bug-eyed poet reads them a poem about Time as the river
that smoothes the roughest stone, that Patience is Love’s other name. It’s
such sweet, touching, sincere, poetic, evocative, honest, heart-felt, winsome
junk, crap, unmitigated flapdoodle, sophomoronic maundering, derivative drivel.
Even if I hadn’t burned those letters and given those notebooks away,
it never had a glimmer of a crumb of a prayer of a chance of a hope of working,
the novel I never did, never could, never would, never dared, write about us.
Dissecting the Unicorn.pdf
Welcome to the Mediated Pro Se Divorce Workbook.
From the drop-down menu, select the number
of nights you failed to give a damn.
Consult the Guilt Index for the hours
required in self-recrimination.
Now multiply by the Self-Pity Factor
and add to the Sorrow Constant.
Please take your time. Be as thorough as possible.
Everything must be paid for.
Under “Opportunity Cost,“ describe
the house you’ll never buy, the child you’ll never have.
Inventory all enchanted community property--
the mattress on which you flew,
the telekinetic teakettle
which boiled whenever you thought it should.
Note: even by mutual consent, phrases and household items
used as projectiles cannot be taken back.
There are Extended Depression Penalties for avoidance and wrong answers.
Everything must be accounted for.
Right click on all hopes and disappointments shared,
times you suffered or rejoiced in each other.
Please check your answers. This is essential for closure,
which is essential for healing, which is essential.
Remember to hit “Submit” when you have finished.
Everything must be grieved for.
Meaning-Making Animals
On our backs up in Haller’s field,
we conjured panthers out of clouds:
“See that part, nearest the sun?
That’s his nose. See it? See it?”
“No. Where, did you say?”
“There, you dodo. Right there.”
“Ohhhh…..…yeah.”
We need to know why lightning strikes the isolated tree;
not to play on hilltop fields when clouds grow dark, articulate;
understand to eat us a panther’s purpose is;
And in Earth’s longest afternoon,
those who learned to play Cause-and-Effect
as well as Hide-and-Seek
lived to teach it to their kids, and they to theirs.
Now the devil Darwin makes us do it,
makes us manufacture meaning
from raw coincidence.
Unreasonable trains derail,
careless friends get cancer,
thoughtless toddlers drown in wading pools
--the abstract art of accident
shaped into personal narrative,
dragging purpose clear from the hissing wreck,
blaming celluar insanity on the body politic,
draining design from little lungs.
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