What to Read This Summer

Terrible are the rose names ...    

Stakeholders in a tradition of

“Grande Amore” and “True Love”

(one carmine, the other blush ... ), their aims

are, for the most part, scattershot.

“Mothersday” and “Playboy,”

“Senior Prom” and “Let’s Enjoy”

vie with a lyrical “Lady of Shalott,”

while a flyweight “Pink Knockout”

comes “Outta the Blue” to mock

“Honey Perfume,” “Pillow Talk”

— jock Cupid wielding clout.

Then maybe a puckish curator

pairs “Las Vegas” with “Nearly Wild,”

“Buttercream” with “Julia Child,”

“Aloha” with “Hello, Neighbor ... ”

 

Misenus, son of Aeolus, god of the wind,

don’t you think it’s bad form

to practice trumpet on this platform,

what with the dentistry squeal

at construction site decibel levels

of braking blade shaving molar steel,

dropped-in blare of delays and arrivals

squelched against granite, at close intervals,

while you riff on “Over the Rainbow” — ?

You received some negative attention

from Triton, after blowing his conch so loud

you inadvertently entered yourself

in an unwinnable contest; now,

stuck in a twenty-first-century translation

of hell, you press the stops, and for an obol

prepare our burial in an infinite axial scroll

with a tinier and tinier turning radius,

as if we were those hordes, the unsanctified,

who shoved one another along the Cocytus,

none led on to the golden bough

by Venus’s semaphore, the unloved rock doves,

whom Virgil treats so gently in the Aeneid.