Beginning With an Acute Stab of Nostalgia, It Gets Worse and Worse

I called Hart on my longer distance line

And in case you didn’t know he is in heavine.

Hart, I implored, I searched your book

(Yes, you have a Collected) and could fine

Nothing about the 36 cast iron bridges in

Central Park, why didn’t you write about one

At least. He said he wrote about the narrow Bow Bridge

For peds built in 1878 which is sad and fine

And always photographed through branches in the foregrine

Which was sufficiently sad to make him weep all the tine

He was trying to write the poem so he threw it away.

He tried again and he uncontrollably wept agine.

Did you try a third tine,

I asked. No, he said, and here’s why:

Life is uncontrollably sad all the time

Unless we divert ourselves with art objects,

Sex, or tequila or beer, and if we tell the truth

About this, for instance when we feel it

While looking at a photograph of the cast ine

Bow Bridge or see in life not photos but the real bridge at a short destine

Away with the actual park and branches around us,

We feel like killing ourselves to stop the pain

Or as you, Arthur, call it, the pine,

So I didn’t try a third time

To write the poem. Get off this line,

He said. Wait! Don’t hang up, he said, I take it back, stay on the phine!

Well, I considered calling on my second longer distance line

Kenneth who in heavine has changed his name to Kenneth Kine

And Barbara who I did call on my second longer distance line

With Hart on hold and affirmed her name change to Barbara Gine

But I didn’t ask those younger two about uncontrollable totally dominant sadness

Or whether they had discarded their own poems about the 36 cast ine

Bridges for people to walk on in Central Park

Because they were weeping on the paper and pine

Ing for Hart’s Big Deep Salty Lake to ease the pine.

I didn’t call Frank because I never knew hine I mean him.

I figured the next step was mine.

So if you can believe it I hung up on Hart Crine.