Let me take this acorn squash, grown in my garden,

And place beside it a poem grown in a hothouse.

You will note the difference at once; the former is jolly

And fat, self-contained, the latter anaemic,

Colorless, tasteless, the clearest evidence

That a poem does not make a squash. But now take the squash,

And shoving its roundness into a lyric book,

Look!

How those covers squinch, being quashed, to elucidate

Something or other

where was I?

Of late

I have been reading too much on this subject.

Art is not life, I am told, and thus in my garden

(Which as a matter of fact has no squashes,

Just toads), I fund myself gathering

Wool mostly, a few old tomatoes of rhymes,

And a mythical rosebud or two in the hope that these items

Will store well against winter, my chosen season,

When nothing from nature is blooming except my

Dog, a few plants on a windowsill, and of course people,

Most of whom,

Like myself,

Are not of the soil, the good earth, and in winter look

More like a poem than a—

but, as I say,

This subject unnerves me.

Where,

Where does one go—into war? poverty?—

To keep those squashes and poems from preening and posing

For any nitwitted author who has mouths

To feed and a ballpoint pen

And some paper

And thinks that if he could settle, once and for all,

Life and art, art and life, and how they are

Knit, he (that nit)

Could stake himself some sort of claim on our cultural garden,

And be forever in squ …

but, as I say,

I have been thinking of going away.