Pope's c-cough of sorts

In honor of Alexander Pope's 274th birthday we post an excerpt from his Essay On Man that is reminiscent in form and spirit of Below Dunster's chiasthmatic coughs:

See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king.
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blest, the poet in his muse.


We say "reminiscent" (as opposed to "similar," "evocative," etc.) because, of course, Dunster was replete with coughs wrought chiasthmatically from well before the days of Pope--regrettably, few have survived. O happy realm, whose people pray for coughs to linger centuries!
Well, we need say little more about this man or his pen. Suffice it to say we wish he had been a Dunsterian, but we console ourselves in his Dunsteriad-evoking work, The Dunciad (1728: The Dunciad: An Heroic Poem; 1729: The Dunciad Variorum; 1742: The New Dunciad; 1743: The Dunciad in Four Books), in which Pope makes clear his pinings for a hypothetical Below Dunster-like world, sadly ignorant that such a domain was in fact flourishing on his own island and surely would have honored an artist of his caliber with the magnificentest of sloes. It is not unlikely that, had the above quatrain been genuinely chiasthmatic, Dunsterians of the time may have heard from afar and transported the short man below Dunster directly.
Posthumously Below Dunster honors him with plums and a post.

two for form, three for you

a morsel in five
then five-plus-two syllables
and then, again, five
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (10/16/2003)


when muses wear bit
and bridle, or hack and then
abscond, leaving this
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (12/03/2003)


how hopes rise in Fall
with my turbulence and peace
on a Gaul-bound plane
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (12/11/2003)


combe-sprawling and soaked
grass and me sotted with sloe
and you, and you too
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (05/16/2006)


century of love
for you, whether I lived three
years or all of it
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (12/31/2100)

399aftershock

worth pondering

chiasthmatic cough XXVI

The poet lacking time to post
The British mailer, vision
Jews are clipped to save the most
Coupons, for circumcision.

Exhibit Kaf

special thanks to Gabriel B. Wickizer

An old ode to an old friend

where the showing up would happen


MIKLAS
(in Sapphic stanza)

Once, for instance, shaved like a monk, you showed up
Wearing painted sneakers and jeans. Your artwork
Was a model of ardor: I remember
Pens of yours running

Out of ink, not due to your scholarly zeal,
But because your trousers were saturated
With it. Sometimes, out of your blue, you took to
Rolling on cobble,

Adding new hues: purple from mixing blood with
Blue already present. An otherwise drab
Vindobona public Gymnasium gained
Dash on your easel.

Sewers were your forts, and at times I joined you
Under Amadeus' deathday city's streets,
Trudging through those soggy canals against the
Laws of our fathers.

Seven years I spent on the teeter-totter
Keeping you in balance with canon’s children;
Seven years I lived as the liaison be-
Tween you and Normal.

Now that I’ve been gone for a weighty eight years,
Has the seesaw tilted you up or down, friend?
Either way, your paints must have spilled, my poor boy
Miklas, my Vincent.

.