If You're So Smart, Why Ain't You Rich?
I need everything else
Anything else
Desperately
But I have nothing
Shall have nothing
but this
Immediate, inescapable
and invaluable
No one can afford
THIS
Being made here and now
(Seattle, Washington
17 May, 1955)
MARIGOLDS
Concise (wooden)
Orange.
Behind them, the garage door
Pink
(Paint sold under a fatuous name:
"Old Rose"
which brings a war to mind)
And the mind slides over the fence again
Orange against pink and green
Uncontrollable!
Returned of its own accord
It can explain nothing
Give no account
What good? What worth?
Dying!
You have less than a second
To live
To try to explain:
Say that light
in particular wave-lengths
or bundles wobbling at a given speed
Produces the experience
Orange against pink
Better than a sirloin steak?
A screen by Korin?
The effect of this, taken internally
The effect
of beauty
on the mind
There is no equivalent, least of all
These objects
Which ought to manifest
A surface disorientation, pitting
Or striae
Admitting some plausible interpretation
But the cost
Can't be expressed in numbers
dodging between
a vagrancy rap
and the newest electrical brain-curette
Eating what the rich are bullied into giving
Or the poor willingly share
Depriving themselves
More expensive than ambergris
Although the stink
isn't as loud. (A few
Wise men have said,
"Produced the same way . . .
Vomited out by sick whales.")
Valuable for the same qualities
Staying-power and penetration
I've squandered every crying dime.
Copyright Credit: Philip Whalen, “If You're So Smart, Why Ain't You Rich?” from The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen copyright © 2007 by Brandeis University Press and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
Source: The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press, 2007)