What's Wrong with America? It's the Shortage of Poker-Playing Dogs - column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

What’s Wrong with America? It’s the Shortage of Poker-Playing Dogs

What’s wrong with America?

Well, as Tevye the Dairyman didn’t say, I’ll tell you – everything went wrong when we got rid of the pictures of those poker-playing dogs.

The other day I visited to the salon of the nice lady who cuts my hair every two weeks, and realized that an essential facet of Americana was missing – pictures of dogs playing pokers, especially that great American classic, “A Friend in Need.”

Oh, sure, the licenses and health certificates are amusing reading (unless Texas laws have been changed recently, acquiring a balloon pilot’s license to take people up into the air and then drop them to their deaths is easier to acquire than a beautician’s license). Last month’s copy of Texas Monthly, fine, fine. It’s not Field and Stream, of course. Flowers, fine. Smelly candle-thingies, okay.

But what’s really missing is an uplifting picture of dogs playing poker.

Early in the twentieth century, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, aka “Cash,” was a jack-of-all-trades but a master of painting anthropomorphic dogs for an advertising firm. His most famous series is known as Dogs Playing Poker (although his dogs were also known to play football and practice law), and they became a staple artistic statement in saloons, waiting rooms, and, most especially, barber shops.

It was poker-playing dogs that made America great.

As Keats would have said were he an American, where are the poker-playing dogs of yesteryear; aye, where are they?

When we had poker-playing dogs we still had a good ten-cent cigar.

When we had poker-playing dogs all our children were good, did their homework, helped out on the farm, and went to Sunday school.

When we had poker-playing dogs we had real battleships, by golly.

When we had poker-playing dogs our airplanes had propellers just as Wilbur and Orville intended, and not those funny-looking jet things.

But now that we’ve gotten rid of the poker-playing dogs, where are we? Hah?

We need those pictures of poker-playing dogs back, yes, sir. I think we should place them next to pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the classrooms of America.

When children pledge Allegiance to the Flag every morning they should be able also to see those poker-playing dogs, and be proud of what this great nation has accomplished in art.

Every barber shop and every hair salon in the Land of the Free should display poker-playing dogs as an inspiration to our fine young men and women.

Restore the poker-playing dogs, and make America unselfconsciously proletarian again!

Shave and a haircut – six bits!

-30-

The Troublesome Life and Lamentable Death of Christopher Marlowe - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Troublesome Life and Lamentable Death of Christopher Marlowe

Marlowe! Dark and dangerous Kit Marlowe
Whose hooded eyes, like a subtle serpent’s, held
In mysterious charms Hero, and too
Leander, perhaps, in the ways of night

And in the councils of foul Walsingham
Where innocence and guilt knew not each other
Through sly reptilian tangles of false oaths
Among the pale queen’s writhing coils of shame

Beneath which altar, then, or perhaps none
Was the famous reckoning paid, and done?

What's Wrong at Connie's Beauty Shop? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

What’s Wrong at Connie’s Beauty Shop?

For Connie, a Friend Indeed

There are no pictures of poker-playing dogs!
The health certificates make for dull reading
And last month’s issue of Texas Monthly
Has not the old cache’ of Field and Stream

There are no pictures of poker-playing dogs!
Among the snaps of Baby’s First Haircut
Children and grandchildren in cute little frames
And lovely young girls all styled for the prom

There are flowers and scents and catalogues

But –

There are no pictures of poker-playing dogs!

Woof!

The Stuffed Men Who Praise Our Soldiers on Independence Day - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Stuffed Men Who Praise Our Soldiers on Independence Day

1.

Stuffed men who never made a single day
Of training make brave speeches on this day

Surely each one of them has his reward -

A government SUV
And bodyguards
And a household staff
And a clean, dry place to sleep
And an income
And medical care
And a pension
And a book deal
And a library
And maybe an eternal flame

2.

And the nation’s enlisted daughters and sons
Who sweat among the rocks, not on the golf course

Have their reward from a grateful nation -

Taking cover behind a blown-up Hummer
They are the bodyguards
They dig holes in the rocks and sand
MREs contracted by the lowest brother-in-law bidder
They stand-to all night under fire
They are paid something less than the president’s special, um, assistant
They will be ignored by the DVA
Their eternal flame is the memory of a death-burnt friend
They are dismissed as millennials and snowflakes
          By the Keyboard Kommandos who learned about war
          Just like our stuffed men in Washington
          By watching Patton over and over

The stuffed men bray every hollow cliché,
But this is what the stuffed men really say:

“Thank you for your service; now shut up and go away

Until we want another photo-op on Remembrance Day”

Solzhenitsyn at Harvard - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Solzhenitsyn at Harvard

Some prophets spoke before the thrones of kings
And others at the gates of Jerusalem
One stood upon a rock and split the sea
And others heard God in the soft, soft wind

A prophet of our time at a table stood
Before a cafeteria table draped in cloth
Fronted a trinity of microphones
And split complacency that rainy day

Umbrellas were dripping, the sky was low
A prophet spoke to us, and we did not know

Should Children be Allowed to Watch This? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Should Children be Allowed to Watch This?

A woman. A knife. A very sharp knife.
She has waited for this hour, this moment
Her eyes – they gleam with passion dark upon
A figure recumbent upon a slab

She is not alone; she is being watched
But no one will dare cry for her to stop
They have all made their agreement, their bond
And now the woman lifts the knife…she strikes…!

She has cut the heart from an artichoke
And the studio audience applauds

Canada Day - Only Once a Year? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Canada Day? Just One?

With love from an ‘umble Yank

But every day is Canada Day!

The afternoon plane lands in Halifax
When the hatch is popped, cool air rushes in
Even the fog is happy in Canada

The Muskogee 1 never made landfall here
And so we pilgrimage for her, completing
Her voyage from ’42 to Canada

Wolfville, Grand Pre’, Le Grande Derangement
The Deportation Cross and beer cans
Well, God forgive the Redcoats anyway

Newfoundland
Is a bold
Anapest

The church spires in a line, the light is green
The bold young captain shoots the narrows wild
Can you find your way to your painted house?

To walk again the cobbles of Ferryland
And smell the very blue of the Atlantic
The sea-blown wind is cold in Canada

Blue Puttees and a mourning Caribou
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord
Good children sing “We love thee, Newfoundland”

Quebec – royal city of New France
May Le Bon Dieu bless the Plains of Abraham,
And may God bless
The signs an English driver cannot read

The Coca-Cola streets of Niagara Falls
Yanks laugh at made-in-China Mountie mugs
And buy them, happy to be in Canada

A cup of Toujours Frais from – well, that place
But to us in your southern provinces
Below Niagara, Tim too is Canada

Though Canada goes on, these scribbles must not –

Your grateful guest wishes only to say
That every happy day is Canada Day!


1 My mother's first husband, Claude Blanchette, was second officer on the oiler Muskogee, torpedoed with the loss of  all her crew while en route from the Caribbean to Halifax in 1942.  My wife and I took Mother to Halifax shortly before her death.

The 10,000-Year-Old Girl - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The 10,000-Year-Old Girl

She is a 10,000-year-old girl
Although she is rather younger today
Only 240 or so
While taking coffee with James Madison

She has discussed the weather with Gilgamesh
Given Keats her handkerchief for his cough
Danced with the fairies on Midsummer Eve
And captured the castle with Cassandra

Because she has listened when the Nine have sung
An old soul she is, and so
                                                          forever young

Soulfight in a Locked Room - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Soulfight in a Locked Room

In the end, they had to break into his room
He was dead in his chair, and quite alone
Self-exiled from his family for years
Alone in a shell, silent, and alone

The accidentals of life were cast away:
A coffee pot, a coat over a door
His schedule for the methadone clinic
A note to meet with his parole officer

But the pathologist’s tox screen was clean -
Better than most of us, he went down fighting

A Tool of the Establishment - column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Tool of the Establishment

Stopping for bright, shiny things lying on the road is seldom a good idea, but since there was no other traffic on a rural road the other morning I stopped to pick up a bright, shiny thing.

Said bright, shiny thing is a spark plug wrench with a handle welded at a right angle. The handle can also be used as a flat-blade screw driver or a pry. The handle is stamped with “STIHL” and a sequence of numbers, so presumably this is a tool which came with one of Stihl’s highly-valued chainsaws.

Most such small-engine spark plug wrenches are double-ended, offering two sizes so that the tool can be packaged with different models. The pronounced asymmetry of this one suggests that the owner hacksawed off the other end, presumably to help manipulate the needed spark plug socket in an awkward space. Your mechanic could tell you many narratives about how the engineers who design gasoline engines sometimes seem determined that spark plugs be placed in almost inaccessible locations.

This wrench is a nice thing someone has lost off a trailer or a pickup, and I hope I can return it to the owner.

Hand tools are in themselves good, honest things, but are now mostly cobbled together out of pot metal in Shanghai, which is why hitting the yard sales for American, German, or Finnish tools is useful. Even if you don’t need another screwdriver, wrench, socket, or chisel right now, you will eventually, and you might as well pick up good used hand tools now instead of paying more for crumbly junk later.

Besides, you might run across some of the good stuff stolen from my garage by those among us whose concept of ownership of the means of production is more from Marx-Lenin-Stalin than from Jesus.

In an aside we may note that Marx, Lenin, and Stalin often spoke of the nobility of the working man, though like many of our modern leaders they seem never to have busted a sweat themselves except on the tennis court or the golf course. (Our state representative, James White, and our federal representative, Brian Babin, are intimately familiar with stringing barbed wire, shoveling ****, pushing a broom, and working the night shift to get through school. That is part of why they are work-boots-on-ground effective. I imagine many of their colleagues just don’t get it.)

There is no app for a properly balanced hammer, for the hammer is the app. It is not programmed, nor can it be recharged. A good steel file responds to the craftsman’s hands, not to a code. A wrench, once purchased, serves the careful owner for the rest of his life, and is not subject to a densely-worded and deceptive contract. Your grandpa’s pocket knife has lasted three generations without losing a satellite signal.

I will never be a good comrade, because I know that books (I’m speaking of Keats, Wordsworth, Lewis, Chesterton, Viktor Frankl et al, not Barbara Cartland [shudder]) are as essential to civilization as hunting, fishing, and good, honest work. This nation needs men and women in “all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war” (John Milton), men and women who know their way around Paradise Lost, the pea patch, iambic pentameter, and a good socket set.

-30-

Hesychasm as Practiced at Midday - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Hesychasm as Practiced at Midday

Cicadas contribute to the silence
With their impious reproductive racket
A cloud of whistles, whirrs, buzzes, and clicks
In the otherwise still and stiller noon

An old man rests his shovel and himself
And sits in the flickering shade awhile
To think of nothing while sweet incense rises
Up from the sacred bowl of his Peterson’s pipe

The Eternal breathes silently over all
(Them cicadas sure is noisy, though)

Because We Respect Words, We Wrestle With Them - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Because We Respect Words, We Wrestle With Them

Suggested by a Thought from Temporal Fugue

Because we respect words, we wrestle with them
And because they respect us, they wrestle back;
We shape them in order serviceable 1
And they refuse to be pinned as cliches’

We fling a needful verb against a noun
To make a thought complete, but then adverbs
And adjectives begin cluttering lines
And then we all must take a coffee break

Because we respect words, we wrestle with them
For every scrap of story, verse, or hymn


1 Cf. John Milton, “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

Everyone has a Clothing Line These Days - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Everyone has a Clothing Line These Days

Well, okay, it’s out there in the back yard
Where on display you’ll see: old boonie hats
Uncool, but good when working in the heat
And cotton khakis from the discount store

Just washed, and drying in the summer sun
Admired by every Merry Little Breeze 1
Skivvies and socks sewn in Cambodia
And work shirts stitched together in Viet-Nam

Nothing by Versace or Calvin Klein
Just old clothes drying on the old clothes line


1 Thornton W. Burgess’ Mother West Wind stories

An Immigration Czar (do we have any spare Romanovs about?) - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An Immigration Czar

Someone demands an immigration czar
Which could be interesting: a crown, a throne
A double-eagle flag, the border guards
Singing a Troparian while on patrol

On the Steppes of Central Texas 1
The Czar in progress royal comes to see
His happy villagers waving MREs
From behind the merry Potemkin wire

The Czar, contented, turns his escort then
To Petersburg, and lunch at the Little Red Hen

1 cf. Borodin's "On the Steppes of Central Asia"

Let no one take this scribble as anything more than a bit of fun about the use of “czar” in a mixed republic / democracy. I am about a thousand miles from the border and don’t know what’s going on there, and prudently do not trust any news source.

The Prophet and the Dancing Girl - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Prophet and the Dancing Girl

When the kitchen staff did the washing-up
They could not but notice, among the bowls
And serviettes, spoons, knives, pitchers, and plates,
One of the best silver trays, blotchy with blood

And scraps of vertebrae, ruining the shine
“Oh, bother; these stains will never come out,”
Muttered the old woman in charge of such things
But she scrubbed and polished, did a good job

With that and with each costly silver cup
When the kitchen staff did the washing-up

The First Blast of the Trumpet (if not the Trump) Against the Monstrous Regiment of Social Media - poem (not much of one, though)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The First Blast of the Trumpet 1 (if not the Trump) Against

the Monstrous Regiment of Social Media

V: Follow us on Facebook or Twitter
R: No


1 No apologies to the odious John Knox

Every Page is Open to the Sun - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Every Page is Open to the Sun

In my religion we're taught that every living thing, every leaf, every bird, is only alive because it contains the secret word for life. That's the only difference between us and a lump of clay. A word. Words are life, Liesel.

- Max to Liesel in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief

We cannot walk with Dostoyevsky as
Guards drag him chained before a firing squad
Comfort Saint Joan against the English flames
Or pray with good Saint Thomas in his cell

We cannot slosh through sodden trenches in France
With Lieutenant Lewis on his birthday
Argue with Akhmatova at The Stray Dog
Or with Frankl at Auschwitz bury dead friends

Unless we read, and then through words we see
The morning sun upon Byzantium

The Existential Sorrow of Waiting Room Art - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Existential Sorrow of Waiting Room Art

Sunlit sailboats in daubs of orange and red
And mass-produced impressionist barn owls
In flight above an unsecured wire rack
Of greasy copies of Reader’s Digest

Behind the receptionist’s hole-in-the-wall
Children of the Cornbread centered in plastic
Jesus-frames grin against their will, freeze-posed
Among department-store studio trees

Across the walls some glued-on murals roam
(But at least this isn’t the funeral home)

The Summer Solstice as Not Celebrated in Texas - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Summer Solstice as Not Celebrated in Texas

One might as well call this an equinox
For night and day are equinoxious now:
Mosquitoes, soul-withering heat and damp
Itch-allergens and rattlesnakes not featured

In advertising fantasies about
Bugless, unbitten happy families
Posing with plates and carnivorous smiles
Before neighbor-envious chromium grills

And playing free of heat rash and pustules
Around surgically sterile swimming pools

Instant Canonization (no cannons, though) - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Instant Canonization

Don’t bother about being a saint so rare-y;
They’ll make you one in your obituary!