Philip Havey

Remington



Fat Freddie gave us what we star-spangled wanted
The irascible Sioux,  the plundering Comanche
And the naked Shoshoni caught in full flight;
He limned the buff and blue figures in Sibley tents
Resplendent with their hot, toddy cups of steaming rum
And the lone trooper rowling his Tennessee stud.

Fat Freddie brought us back to the first day's cigarette
Amid buffalo robes and steaming sowback
While the horizon cleared itself of Montana mists.

Fat Freddie had a good touch for the badlands
He drew with the fake wonder of a penny dreadful.

Friddie's thick hand laid out Dodge and Cheyenne
With poles, corrals and Pawnee camps
Long after they had gone over to brickwork and derbies.
The cold stream of his soldiers snapped like banners
A crossed the locked surfaces of oils and chalks
With never a hint of weeviled tack or rotten bacon.

Fat Freddie opened our eyes to the lemon sift of prairie
And what purples shadows can cast upon the barrancas
Until ever newsboy and little seamstress in New York  knew
How Wyoming's soil often was the color of cut salmon.

"Damn fine show!", said Teddy standing just off the Rose Garden
Where only the butterflies were a true yellow 
And the bordering carnations never quite found the pink 
Of the cimorrone.

"Damn fine show!", Teddy said, again, running his fingers 
Along the thick, gilded frames they had thrown 
Around Freddie's work like golden stockades and nobody questioned 
What he wrote above his name upon treaties going westward 
To where the lean Lakoda hung about the forts like wisps of smoke 
Caught in the folds of their blankets.

Smith



Only in an age of Picasso and television interference
Can we fully comprehend this disjointed fettle of body parts 
Concocted from cast-iron whimsies and fossilized foibles 
That blended themselves into that bewigged, stutter of a man.
How he smiled with untrammeled surety while conversing
At length with ghosts, gnomes and other bogies of that kind;
How, at any moment, combinations of his joints would flex 
Out of unison and flail about, throwing him into a sequence 
Of contortive fits he proudly called his "thinker's cramps";
How, one day, when holding forth on "the resources of labor",
He strayed off the common walkway into a tanner's pit
And the rendered fats and limes mingled with his thoughts
Into such a volatility of  mixture, he had to be racked home
Upon birch poles between two apprentices like any civet cat;
How, after pouring water into a pot of buttered breakfast toast,
He found it the worst tea ever brewed in the history of the race;
How, reading Hume, he immediately took on a hundred ailments, 
Beyond the purview of the twenty doctors stabled in his pay;
How, unable to present a hand even he himself could later read,
He dictated lengthy papers on agiotage and currency reform 
To any literate stranger he could importune off  the street ;
How he needed a near neighbor to negotiate with tradesmen
In his behalf over the simplest household purchases like oats,
Lank wools, bolted cloth, fodder and such other daily sundries
After he admitted having no head for tracking simple pence
And found his farthings fly out of  his pockets on wings
Swifter than the little wrens who overtaxed the public dust;
How, he would agitated his thoughts into their proper state, 
By butting the plaster above his mantel down to the brick;
How, on days incommensurate with corners or curves,
He walked the entire length of Edinburgh into the heather,  
Making for the blue clayed hills beyond, "well put too"
In satin slippers, sashed silken gown and slumber cap
Before some kindly tinker or housewife tugged his lapels
To turn him  back around on a straight track towards home
Where he used his pen to better the world for our Betters,
While the rest of us stayed steady headed, calmly coordinated,
And compliantly folded like proper napkins upon our knees.

Wittgenstein



"If I loose heart or flinch when I hear shots-
 that's the sign of a false view of life." LW
									

I

Within their neat laboratories of destruction,
The calculations had gone our of hand.
Trenches became opposing firing squads
Beneath a constant dawn of tracer fire;
From both camps, meridians were crossed
And recrossed through sieves of coiled wire
In the way water runs down hill.
Poets died; thugs died 
And a more than the projected number
Of gentlemen fell among the ranks 
To be lain within common graves 
Carved from mud-shine and debris. 



II

He saw those for whom he cared the most borne above him
Like star-rockets fired just above the lines,
Slowly rising, bright balls of luminescences
Lofted into zeniths of momentary brightness
Before ghosting back as waffered ash.
Wherever he reached out his hand 
He encountered the resinous edges
Of green-wood crosses or the blind redundancy
Of rifles shoved muzzle downward 
Into freshly spaded earth
As roadsigns leading to the darkest carrion.



III

A brother, his teacher and a dozen protégés
Simply stood up and left the room
As if some solemn task had been concluded.
Each, he later reflected, paused, monetarily,
To motion him from the threshold of the doorway, 
But he chose not to follow.



IV

His trench-mates called him-"The man with the Russian Gospel"
For, as he would tell Russell over tea in Cambridge Commons,
Tolstoy's words had saved him more than once,
Yet they could not stop the pencil in his hand 
From jotting down the precise notations when the coordinates 
For the next shelling needed to be given.

		
V

He later asked, on a pad of foolscap George Moore sent to his prison camp,-
How one could ever come to know when another was in pain?