George Edwin Starbuck Poems

I Recto

Over the
seaworthy
cavalry
...

for Joshua Starbuck, master of montage
A Caledonian megalith.
A tinted bather from Cape Ann.
The 1937 kith
...

purged of accretions & newly published in the corrected hemimeter version prepared under the general folgership of G. Starbuck

Poor Soul
...

Here is the grackle, people.
Here is the fox, folks.
The grackle sits in the bracken. The fox
hopes.
...

"Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card"
and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself.
You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration
of the Enemy Aggressor.
...

"Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are
No rhymes)" was just the title, and I only read that far.

That was because I felt like some old agent-of-the-Czar
When a new plotter swims within the scope of his exertions,
...

Virgin, sappy, gorgeous, the right-now
Flutters its huge prosthetics at us, flung
To the spotlights, frozen in motion, center-ice.
...

for Helen Vendler
O for a muse of fire, a sack of dough,
Or both! O promissory notes of woe!
One time in Santa Fe N.M.
...

I wonder what the Greeks kept in these comicstrip canisters.
Plums, milletseed, incense, henna, oregano.
Speak to me, trove. Tell me you contained dried smoked tongue once.
Or a sorcerer or a cosmetologist's powders and unguents.
...

for Arthur Freeman
Pigfoot (with Aces Under) Passes

The heat's on the hooker.
Drop's on the lam.
...