Portrait From The Infantry

A poem by Alan Dugan

He smelled bad and was red-eyed with the miseries

of being scared while sleepless when he said

this: “I want a private woman, peace and quiet,

and some green stuff in my pocket. Fuck

the rest.” Pity the underwear and socks,

long burnt, of an accomplished murderer,

oh God, of germans and replacements, who

refused three stripes to keep his B.A.R.,

who fought, fought not to fight some days

like any good small businessman of war,

and dug more holes than an outside dog

to modify some Freudian’s thesis: “No

man can stand three hundred days

of fear of mutilation and death.” What he

theorized was a joke: “To keep a tight

asshole, dry socks and a you-deep hole

with you at all times.” Afterwards,

met in a sports shirt with a round wife, he was

the clean slave of a daughter, a power brake

and beer. To me, he seemed diminished

in his dream, or else enlarged, who knows?,

by its accomplishment: personal life

wrung from mass issues in a bloody time

and lived out hiddenly. Aside from sound

baseball talk, his only interesting remark

was, in pointing to his wife’s belly, “If

he comes out left foot first” (the way

you Forward March!), “I am going to stuff

him back up.” “Isn’t he awful?” she said.

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Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus

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Poems in English 

• The Exeter Road poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The End poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Cyclists poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Cross-Roads poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Crescent Moon poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Coal Picker poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Coal Picker poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Captured Goddess poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Bungler poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Boston Athenaeum poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Book of Hours of Sister Clotilde poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Bombardment poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Blue Scarf poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Basket poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Allies poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Allies poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• Teatro Bambino. Dublin, N. H. poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• Sword Blades and Poppy Seed poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell

More external links (open in a new tab):

Russian Commerce Agency

Dealing Monster

Doska or the Board – write anything

Search engines:

Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)

Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.

Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees

Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.

Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.

 

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