On First Looking in on Blodgett's ...*
Starbuck, George (1931-)

Mellifluous as bees, these brittle men
droning of Honeyed Homer give me hives.
I scratch, yawn like a bear, my arm arrives
at yours -- oh, Honey, and we're back again,
me the Balboa, you the Darien,
lording the loud Pacific sands, our lives
as hazarded as when a petrel dives
to yank the dull sea's coverlet, or when,

breaking from me across the sand that's rink
and record of our weekend boning up
on  The Romantic Agony , you sink
John Keats a good surf-fisher's cast out -- plump
in the sun's wake -- and the parched pages drink
that great whales' blanket party hump and hump.

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* On First Looking in on Blodgett's Keats's "Chapman's Homer"

The Oxford Book of American Light Verse (Harmon)