Here's a villanelle I wrote about the time I moved from New York (home of Murderer's Row and the perennial world champion New York Yankees and their unassuming fans) to Boston in the early 80's, and had great fun with at poetry readings in the Boston-Newburyport corridor - it was my closer, and the New England poets would pelt me with tea bags and beer cans (were you there, Jim?), while police grudgingly protected me and led me from the reading. My home team, the Powow River Poets, disowned me. All this ended, unfortunately, in October, 1984, when the world turned upside down.
October Speaks
...(A poem for the city of Boston. And environs.)
It is ordained that things will fall apart.
Do not delude yourself – remember that
when summer ends I get to break your heart
with dark and practiced skill that makes an art
of pain, turns every champagne bubble flat.
It is ordained that things shall fall apart
again. You have no charts that can outsmart
a lack of will; no joyful entrechat
when summer ends. The bullpen breaks your heart,
the pitchers drink, the fleet no longer dart
from base to base; with every splintered bat
it is ordained that things will fall apart.
And yet you dance and hope for hope to start
each year, and dreams become your habitat,
till summer’s final ball shall break your heart;
the beer cans, bouncing, clatter from the cart,
the fat relievers shame the Theocrat:
it is ordained that things will fall apart.
When summer ends I get to break your heart.
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