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Of a Feather
Professor Swann was new among the fonts
of knowledge chugging up the tenure track;
he’d earned his place among the college fac-
ulty with bold views and a fierce response
to critics. Apropos to ambience
the ivied walls lent, students dared attack
his points with blatant relish for their lack
of proper homage—Vive la résistance!
The old department chair who’d vouched for Swann
one year ago could scarce contain his chuckling:
How fitting that the fledgling now must don
the feathers of his elders, short on truckling
admirers whom he could impose upon,
forgetting he’d once been the ugly duckling.
.
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The Four-Color Problem
—trying to prove that no more than four colors are
required to color the regions of any map so that no
two adjacent regions have the same color (proven in
1976 by Appel and Haken at The University of Illinois)
Grim symbols grapple in the gaslight, much
entangled, like a nest of snakes, a rash
of colors bleeding on a map; they touch
across established ink-line borders, clash
and clamor in a reckless street fight. Such
disorder isn’t easy to explain
within the canon of topology,
for reconciling meaning with the pain
requires some recondite theology
or garden-variety legerdemain.
.
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Buying Time
Let us pretend our hearts are in the right
places, and let us set aside the small
differences that occur no matter what,
even when things are going well. Tonight
I want a level playground, to rebut
ingrained assumptions which have cast a pall
across our once well-lighted neighborhood,
the area we’d thought we settled down
in, not just settled for. It’s no surprise
our former dreams fell flat; for all the good
our wishes did, we might have closed our eyes
and picked at random any run-down town
we’d never heard of, which is precisely
the problem: everything that we assumed
was based on inexperience. The lot
we blithely mortgaged might’ve served nicely
in a short-term occupancy, but not
for permanence. From the start we were doomed.
.
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C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden. Hundreds of his poems have appeared in scores of print and electronic journals out of North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Australia and India. His collection, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.
I had almost forgotten how long a sentence can be sustained and how adept you are at still providing great rhymes in a laudable consistent manner. Each poem is interesting in its own way for the fascinating subjects that seem to be pulled out of thin air by a unique intellect yet are of significant interest and meaning. 1.) Poem #1 pulls together feathers and ugly duckling while making a great point about forgetting when someone was once a beginner in a position. 2.) With Poem #2 the color puzzle is something few of us likely ever knew about and then the masterful verse of reconciling disorder, which was beautifully phased. 3.) Poem #3 comes to a stark realization, “From the start we were doomed.” Great lessons in all of them.
You read, Roy, every bit as well as you write. It’s a pleasure to pique your interest.
Great play on Swann/feathers/ugly duckling!
I love the rhyme scheme of “Buying Time”, and also the interesting but frustrating experience it expresses: disappointment in the place where one lives, perhaps because the place changes, or for other reasons.
Ich kann nicht anders, Cynthia. I’m fairly happy with where I live, as I hope you are. Let us not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
I’ve hesitated to comment on the poem “Buying Time” because I wasn’t sure if I was reading and understanding it perfectly. The other two poems seem straightforward — the first is a clear narrative of “What goes around, comes around,” and the second is a meditative-comic piece on what seems to be a minor cartographical problem, but which Kip Anderson uses as a vehicle for commentary on violent conflict.
But “Buying Time” seems to be a dramatic monologue spoken by one spouse to another about their regrets over where they have chosen to live. The town that they picked doesn’t seem to live up to their original expectations. I get the impression, however, that this could very well be an allegorical piece on life itself — perhaps it argues that our temporary existence in the world of the living might seem at first to be so lovely and comfortable that we unconsciously hope for it to be permanent. But we only have “short-term occupancy.” And within that small space of time, all sorts of problems and difficulties arise that make our home less than idyllic.
The reason, Joseph, that “Buying Time” is hard to understand perfectly might be that the poem is essentially an emotive rant. I hadn’t thought of it as an allegory, but maybe I should have.
The four-color problem is anything but a minor topological problem. We’ve known for centuries that only four colors are necessary to color a map (due to the lack of any counterexamples), but until recently no one was able to provide a mathematical proof.
C.B. Beyond the content-commentary contained in each of these three delightfully entertaining poems, your clever, self-distinctive enjambments are neatly described by your phrase, “much entangled.”
Yow, James! I’m glad you could follow the thread.