People are always saying, “In my day . . .” They say, “In my day, we walked through drifts of stale bread two foot high and ate blizzards for dinner.” But we have to remember that in their day they also used words like davenport and gallavant. And that words and meanings, for better or for worse, die—just like beloved pets.

***

Don’t think about what you don’t have; instead, think about what you would have if what you did have was gone. Or something like that. Something got lost among the double negatives. Life is a double negative, and we are the lost something.

***

Always remember the story of the man who spent his life writing thank you cards in anticipation of one day receiving a wonderful gift. He never received the gift. He just died. They found his body buried under thousands of cards.

***

One day I will die and join that big club in the sky, the Modern Language Association.

***

Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” But I just know deep inside that he wasn’t talking about me.

***

Selected Participles of T.S. Eliot:

Scuttling
Mixing
Talking
Sprawling
Rubbing
Rising
Mounting
Breeding
Feeding
Hushing
Dying
Covering
Descending

***

We all have a friend in Jesus. I did too, but we drifted apart. He was just too busy during the holidays.

***

Life is infinitely sad. Sadness moves at the speed of light. It is always present in our lives. The speed of light is a construction of science, a way to control what we really don’t know. Thus, science is the verification of sadness.

***

Imagine the world without the letter “S.” We would have to invent entirely new languages. We could never whisper in the shadows. The kind of romance that leads to most plural nouns would disappear. I could never kiss you again. I would have to do something that sounded completely different.

***

Some things need to be taken slowly. Rituals, mostly. I remember one time the priest was in a hurry. For communion, he told us he was skipping the usual lining up procedure. Instead, we had to remain in our seats with our mouths open while he tossed the wafers, like confetti, over us all. Actually, they weren’t like confetti. It was more like catching snowflakes on your tongue, except that these were made of flour and were all exactly the same. My mother still cries when she recalls this event. At least she doesn’t call me as much as she used to.

***

Think of all those from your past and the lessons they have taught you:

Sammy Davis, Jr.: Humility

Jerry Lewis: Humility

Vice-President Richard Cheney: Humility

And so on. If you’ve learned one thing in life, it’s that learning is its own reward.

***

Purpose. What is your purpose in life? people always ask. Think of all the Christmas trees lying by the curb a few days after Christmas. A week ago they were the center of happiness, green solar systems lifting planets and stars from their branches.

***

Final score of the W.B. Yeats Bowl:

Worst filled with passionate intensity: 29

Best who lack all conviction: 0

***

What is charity? Don’t ask the drunks. One day I hung an enormous feeder from the old silver maple tree in my backyard. It was like a bird feeder, only ten times the size and filled with liquor instead of birdseed. All the drunks in town began gathering around it, chatting, flittering, grunting. I watched them through binoculars and took detailed notes of their plumage. I published my notes and became a celebrity, a sort of third-rate Audubon. Thus, even drunks know that nothing in life is free.

***

Hang in there. Last summer I found a book of poetry in the library that hadn’t been checked out in fourteen years. So I checked it out and kept it for a day. It lay on the porch swing while I played with my kids. I didn’t have a chance to read it because my wife took it back to the library, thinking that I had already read it. Maybe I shouldn’t have checked it out at all. But I still remember that book I never read, even more than some I did.

***

Nietzsche said that to be truly creative we have to regain that sense of play we had as children. One day, when I asked my four-year-old son to clean up his toys, he said, “Dad, why do you have a face?” From then on, whenever anyone asks me to do something I don’t want to do, like serve on the University Goals and Assessment Committee, I just look at them and say, “Why do you have a face?” I have much more time to be creative.

***

I went to the ice cream parlor with my kids the other day and tried this new flavor: “Ashbery.” I couldn’t tell what in the hell it was supposed to taste like and there was so much of it.

***

Always imagine what you would like people to say about you at your funeral and then start becoming that person. Once, I pretended to be dead and my children just kicked me and said, “he’s not really dead.” And that is what I hope people say about me at my funeral.

***

What is beauty? Who owns it? One of the sexiest things I have ever seen is the underside of a giant Manta Ray. It looked like the ghost of the universe coming back to devour the world, or the face of a naked man, smiling as he emerges from the silken lingerie of the first real snowfall.

***

Pascal said that most of man’s misery results from his inability to sit still in room.
And then I kicked his ass.

***

I have heard that driving makes you stupid. The more you drive, the dumber you get. I got into my car and drove in reverse, hoping to undo the damage. I ended up in a place where no one ever made a mistake. I couldn’t tell if I was any smarter or happier.

***

Say vaganza a go go. Say armatronic. Say fontanelle-ly. Say reverse liposuction retread. Say he’s the poster child for colorful and fun-loving neuroses. Okay, now you can come to my party. Noam Chomsky will be there. He once said, “Any time I’m at a party and I hear the prefix ‘post’ come up in conversation, I just walk out of the room.”
He’s always #1 on the guest list.

***

Wallace Stevens said that “Death is the mother of Beauty.” But who is the mother-in-law?
Unexplainable things happen in life, and we just have to accept them. One day, my three-year-old daughter said out of the blue that God was “triangular.” The next day in the newspaper there was a quote from Spinoza: “If triangles had gods, they would be eminently triangular.” It was creepy that a Midwestern newspaper was quoting Spinoza.

***

Remember, it can always get worse. In January, it was so cold that our screams froze in mid-air. We pulled them down, and when they thawed, they looked like large wrinkled lips. No good for kissing, but lips nonetheless.

***

Make inferences. For example: You see a great light. You are in your mother’s arms again. You are floating on a cloud, and everyone you see is beautiful and happy.
You are not shopping.

***

Prehistoric Field Guides for Children #2: The Poets:

i. The first poets appeared over 300 million years ago.

ii. With its massive hind legs and enormous flexible jaws, the Poet Laureate could attack by surprise and hold struggling victims in its serrated teeth. Joining forces with other poets in a herd, it could surround larger prey, taking out huge chunks of flesh with one bite.

iii. The “Horned Neo-Formalist” appeared 225 million years ago as a three-legged meat eater no bigger than a turkey. But his super-sized second cousin, Hipsoloafatron, was the most ferocious predator in the world at that time.

iv. We have no idea what the real Sylvia Plath looked like or even if it existed. All we have is this artist’s rendering of a ten-foot-tall thigh bone that may or may not have belonged to the species.

v. On the plains of North America, two hungry M.F.A. candidates hunt for food. Both have sharp fangs and claws. But one has a blade-like horn on its snout. The blade-less one turns tail and runs, while the other commands the field.

vi. The last poet died over 60 million years ago. No one knows why, but scientists have many theories. They always do.

vii. Other books in this series include The Philosophers and Actuarial Scientists: Monsters of the Deep!

***

Walt Whitman was caught among the competing vortices of classicism, modernism, and romanticism. He knew that the only way out was by using his vaporizing death ray.

***

Actual quote from my wife: “It’s too bad you can’t divorce your sister.”

***

Kevin Griffith's poetry has appeared in many journals, including ReDivider, Shampoo, Mid-American Review, and Chelsea. His third book of poetry, Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange, was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the 2006 Pearl Poetry Prize and will appear in September.