Three Poems

 

Ballade of the Ladies

Translation from the original: François Villon

Would someone kindly tell me please
Where the Roman, Flora, went?
And where is Alcibiades,
Her cousin? In what continent?
And Echo, singing merriment...
Speak up now, someone, if you know,
Is Echo's lovely timbre spent?
And where did last year's snowflakes go?

And where on earth is Heloise
Whose lover's private parts were rent,
The subject of such cruelties
Brought down in such a foul descent?
And where's the Queen whose heart was bent
Against young Buridan so low
She drowned him in the Seine, poor gent?
And where did last year's snowflakes go?

And Blanche, the Queen, who sang with ease,
And Siren-like made men content?
And Big Foot Bertha, Beatrice?
And Arembourg, Maine's resident?
And Joan, who still would not relent
Although the flames attacked her so?
Virgin, my poor ears are bent!
And where did last year's snowflakes go?

Prince, don't ask me to invent
Responses that seem apropos.
In this refrain my answer's pent:
And where did last year's snowflakes go?

 

The Monkey Files

Every poem has already been written,
waiting to be discovered,
including this one. A monkey made them,

and most of what the monkey made
made little sense, but somehow
the monkey banged out this little gem,

which may not be great human poetry
but is still pretty impressive for a monkey
who was typing with one hand

and shoving a banana into his mouth
with the other. And since what he was typing
was entirely random, it's miraculous

these words are spelled correctly
and contribute to sentences that happen
to correspond with thoughts of the random human

who rescued them from the monkey slush pile
and gave them a life, however meager,
the monkey could not dream of.

 

The Monkey Files, Part 2

I wonder which human being will find this poem
and forget to remind himself that the hairy fingers
that typed these words were twitching

on the keyboard without pattern or design,
and the creature who first created this array
of words and letters, entirely by accident,

had no idea whatsoever it was making signs
that humans might in some way recognize.
They had no meaning when the monkey typed them

and still would not, but a human saw an image
inside them, like the Lord's image on a piece of toast,
and cared enough to yank it from the monkey files.