RHE poems
Poems by Richard Epstein. Not much commentary, only one picture (sorry, Alice), and little disruption: just a place to find poems by Richard Epstein
Thursday, July 17, 2025
The Marvells of Fruita
Friday, July 11, 2025
Tarnish Town
The potentates are marching from St. Paul,
More of them stuffed inside a tiny car
Than Billy has Spaghetti-Os. The nurse
Flaunts her prosthetic sword, says Opioids,
And all fall down. In wheezing lungs, shaved heads,
And intubated families they fail
Of faith. The potentates ride in, clean up
The tarnished town, a sink of billyclubs
And graft, and scrub the spangled bedroom doors—
They manage with panache and housemaid’s knees.
The little children smile and pack their bags
And hide under the porch until the bus,
The friendly yellow bus with plastic seats,
Opens its doors and swears it is today.
Saturday, July 05, 2025
The Book of Simple
The Book of Simple teaches you how to make
And distant. How, without it, can you steep
Teabags of Life? Would you like her to be bleached
And buxom, do you need to make her love
The man you were, unlikely as that seems?
You've got to go there. Really. You go there.
Of course it isn't cheap, not having been
Online auditioned or a paperback
At Harold's Half-Price Inwits. There's a crone
In Crawford with a stack in her Tuff Shed,
Guarded by gargoyles and a papillon;
And drop-ins she doesn't like are mostly dead
And numerous. When Lifetime tried to shoot
A movie version there, the black was white.
I bought one at her jumble sale last May.
It changed me round. Now I can call to mind
The minor dramatists I never read,
And then some. And the foxes stop to stare.
They catch some scent, a brief response to pain.
It can't be memorized. It must be read
Each time as though from scratch. The crone once made
A golem in a golden-thread sombrero
Who danced at her command. The April rains
Reduced him to a plaster statuette.
Made in Crawford, it says there on the sole.
Tuesday, July 01, 2025
Epic In The Making
This was the edict: When the snow first fell,
He headed for the High Country, to stay
Until the bears took out their winter trash
And mockingbirds regained their higher range.
Meanwhile, he’d cover one royal family
In hexametric verse—Plantagenets
One January, Hapsburgs, though he fell
Asleep, spilling his ink, in staunching them.
The lynx, extinct, as all good families knew,
Admired declamation, and he fed
The shrews his extra feet. I say, he said,
Attempting the Romanovs, when comets fell,
Or airplanes, on his field of vision, there
Between his clothesline and the Finland Train.
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Pluvial Morphology
The rain invents a ouija board. It points
LQK ATT, precatory and sibylline.
And soon effaced in promiscuity.
The walk now stands for everything at once,
Like dreams and abstract artifice. The rain,
It raineth only some days here, a treat
Of dissolution. Carry me away,
Its strain, its burden. We must quite forget
We all go somewhere: somewhere in the sea
O REASON NOT THE NEED is spelled in kelp.
The silt holds every sound that can be said.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Cartoon Love
1
Ye Olde McDuck notwithstanding, swimming
in shekels never seemed much fun—the crunch
and jingle of a pool? No, maybe not.
But think about the Beagle Boys voyeuring,
the salivating nephew in his sailor
blues, the troika jabbering like woodchucks;
and every ducklette Duckburg knows is damp,
ready to peel her thong off in the bullion.
Throw the poolboy a grand gratuity
and drive Miss Daisy off to the cabana.
Under a smiley moon Donald sings love
songs to the jangle of the ukulele.
No one can understand a consonant.
Is pain more painful when you're bottom duck?
2
Beep beep. Boop boop. The flapper runs full tilt
at the canyon wall, perspective in her head
enough to carry her though paint and stone.
The coyote follows, thinking her the bird,
the acme of his hope, dinner. Sees stars.
They say that men get off on buxom drawings,
pulchritudinous bunnies, collagened.
Granny passes on bulldogs stuffed with pecs.
She's holding out for tabloid zillionaires.
You dream of Tweety with the light brown hair?
Consider life insurance and tuition.
The coyote runs, his legs a blurring wheel,
and falls for lack of faith, the canyon floor
rising. He passes the anvil on his way.
Monday, June 16, 2025
Classical Education
Greek to me, it was just as though I read
A language I had never known, but wanted
To understand. Black squiggles on the page,
A scent of frat boys drinking beer on Sunday—
Pindar, Sophocles, and the Kappa Sigs.
I filled my mouth with pebbles—well, more like
Gravel: it lined the sea millennia
Ago, when I was still invertebrate—
Orating made me sound like I was mumbling,
Oatmeal and not Demosthenes. I thought
Of those of my friends who had studied Latin
While I picked Russian for its false prestige
And didn't learn even that. They could read Virgil
And think of Homer. I now read the funnies,
Laugh at them, too. I orated some oatmeal
And thought of slave girls, of the spoils of purchase,
How I could compliment in my own tongue:
Hey, baby, want to dance? I once knew Russian.
I thought, there must have been some Greek louts, too,
And they spoke Greek, even when they were toddlers,
But didn't say, It's all English to me.
They didn't know the stuff they didn't know.
Under the olive trees they thought of maples
Not even a little, wished to grasp the form
Of The Infield Fly Rule not all, nor thought
Of leaving home for Hollywood. Not once.
That made them classical, even with acne,
Even when sure they were misunderstood,
Phallically challenged, or divinely sent
To free the boy next door from some damned girl.