Archive
07/15/09 - (2)
A Not-So-Fine Kettle of Fish You've Gotten Yourself Into, This Time
Now, just like that, the other, and this, you find yourself home, Home to nowhere, everywhere, Frying, to a live crisp, In Ollie's fine kettle of Mrs. Paul's X-Large Crispy Fish Sticks, Indistinguishable from anonymity's greatest misses and hits.
And what a cataclysmic shock to your compromised system This climacteric is. (Believe me — you, being your closest confidante, should know.) It dawns on you that if you're thinking Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, You're sorely, woefully, bedraggedly mistaken.
You are, though not all that pop-cultured academically, Alluding to that quintessential comedic duo of the '30s and '40s, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Master-craftsmen technicians of the foible, the pratfall, Who raised, to a new low, the high art of human vulnerability.
Not yet back a single week, In gruesomely tedious, stupendously polluted St. Louis, After having disappeared into the brisk, humidityless climes Of northern Wisconsin, thirty miles southeast of Duluth, You realize that your kettle of fish was simmering there,
Not boiling, as it is in the toil-and-trouble city of your birth, And that had you realized what was good for your psyche, You would have stayed up there, the rest of your life, Catching crappies, bluegills, pickerels, perches, Smallmouth basses, trouts, walleyes, and northern pikes. You readily admit that Ollie's fine kettle of fine-fettle fish Puts you in mind of rods, reels, lines, leaders, sinkers, hooks, Trolling, in a wooden Old Town canoe, A time, in youth, when you weren't yet domesticated To civilization's Machiavellian strictures
And kettles of tomorrow's fish wrap weren't served a day early, Courtesy of iPhone, BlackBerry, and laptop instantaneity, The immediacy of bloggers metastasizing, prophesying, From deep in the backwater countrysides of Andhra Pradesh To cold-water flats two blocks off Times Square.
Tonight, staring at a plate of greasy Mrs. Paul's fish sticks No amount of tartar sauce can make edible, You wish you could be back in Wisconsin, Swimming around, in Lake Nebagamon's fine kettle of fish, Caught on a hook cast by Laurel and Hardy's slapstick shadows.
07/15/09 - (2)
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