Six Playing Cards
A history lesson
At the back of the store
or out on the porch
they once played a long game called euchre
no one plays this game now
but it caused the birth of the Joker
who has nothing to do with the Hanged Man, the Fool
or even the Juggler
who has nothing to do with Mercury,
Hermes, or Ariel
Who is related to Coyote
West Africa´s Spider or the cannibal Badger of Nippon
only in the hustles of splendid coffee-table books
It´s Euchre Best Bower!
all bets are off
a jockey plays baseball
the bee scratches his nuts
and a freelance recluse in Climax, Utah
is carefully painting a cap and bells
from Imperfect Fit—Selected Poems
Excerpt from “A Map of Charlottesville”
Stand still. Here on the map is the cookhouse that once
belonged to the oldest house in Charlottesville. Since the big
house is long gone, the cookhouse must be the oldest. Aggie
bought it in 1936. Various builders had added rooms, a slant-
ceilinged top floor, a back extension. Stone and board siding,
bright green tin roofing. The original roof would have been
cedar shingles. Step into this den of deliberate resistance; of
bohemian charm wrapped in imperialist pretension. What do you
think of John LaFarge? of Lafcadio Herne?
The scents rise from worn carpets and still older floor boards,
from the walls of books and the faded velvet love seat, from
dust in the cracks of the huge stone fireplace large enough for a
ten-year-old to stand in with its scary iron pot hooks from
slavery days. More scents still rise from her horse-hair stuffed
armchair with the lion feet, from her overflowing ashtrays, the
open fire, the unwashed dogs, the cat that shat in back of the
furnace room. There´s a hint of spilled bourbon, good olive oil,
the cinnamon sticks for her morning coffee, and the open
turpentine cans in her studio just upstairs. Her smoky Chinese
tea mingles with silver tarnish and the must of twenty-year-old
tissue paper in which she wrapped broken china pieces kept in
the sideboard drawer.
Is a door open? There are mulched roses just outside. And cut
flowers gone old in a bowl. She planned to paint that bouquet
weeks ago. There too are the fascinating drops of urine
gleaming up the dark stairs to the upstairs toilet. Aggie’s
bladder had loosened years before I knew her. She treated her
problem with lofty denial.
These things speak for and against her. She was a ruin, a
parasite, deeply bigoted by belief in her innate superiority. She
believed in charm, and always tailored her stories to amuse her
hearers. She was a loyal friend. The little house in
Charlottesville was often full of company, in twos and threes for
tea and drinks, in dense crowds when Aggie threw a party.