To an Old Copy of Eat, Pray, Love (After Longfellow)
Welcome, my old adversary,
Welcome to domestic free box,
While the moody gales of summer
Shake the windows.
The ungrateful middle class
has, it seems, dealt harshly with thee,
Since, beneath the skies of Southeast Asia
First thy sentences were writ.
There are marks of age,
There are thumb-marks on thy margin,
Made by hands that clasped thee rudely,
by a private swimming pool.
Soiled and dull thou art;
Yellow are thy time-worn pages,
As the russet, rain-molested
Leaves of untended hydrangeas.
Thou art stained with white wine
Scattered from hilarious stemware,
As these leaves with the libations
Of the Barefoot Contessa.
Yet dost thou recall
Days departed, half-forgotten
When in dreary middle-age, the recently divorced wandered
By the blanket-sellers in India.
When they paused to hear
The old ballad of Queen Oprah
Shouted from suburban living rooms
In the twilight.
Thou recallest mommy bloggers,
Who, in solitary chambers,
And with hearts by passion wasted,
Quoted thy pages.
Thou recallest homes
Where thy platitudes of love and eating and prayer
Made the gloomy New England winter
Bright as summer.
Once some ancient WASP
In her bleak, ancestral Westport,
Chanted staves of these old passages
To the book club.
Once in the Pacific Palisades,
At the court of old Queen Murphy
Gwyneth and her boon companions
Sang these ditties.
Once the Mill Valley knitters' union
Sang them in their humidified yurts;—
Suddenly the American media
Joined the chorus!
Peasants in the Barnes & Noble
Cruise-ship-passengers on the roaring ocean,
Students, anti-vaxxers, pale consignment shop owners
All have sung them.
Thou has been their friend;
They, alas! have left thee friendless
Yet at least, in one local free-box
Art thou welcome.
And, as rats nest
In these wide, old-fashioned bins
So thy twittering soundbites shall nestle
in the basement of some bourgeois cat lady.
Quiet, close, and slightly wet,
Sheltered from all consideration,
And recalling by your water-damaged pages
Privilege and travel.
