Elizabeth Austin, a vice president of corporate communications at Playboy in Chicago, as well as a friend of Joanne Gruber, as well as an alumna of The Washington Monthly, as well as a friend of Nick Thompson, has, in the course of other correspondence, asked “Did I tell you how much I enjoyed The Coup? It spoke to me particularly, as I was working for the Lieutenant Governor at the time…”) Well, no, Elizabeth, but better late than never. Some messages later, after noting that she really didn’t know me well enough to send me poetry, she sent me a poem. And a nice one it is.
Literature in the 21st Century
by Ronald Wallace
Sometimes I wish I drank coffee
or smoked Marlboros, or maybe cigars˜
yes, a hand-rolled Havana cigar
in its thick, manly wrapping,
the flash of the match between
worn matchbook and stained forefinger,
the cup of the palm at the tip,
the intake of air, and the slow and
luxuriant, potent and pleasurable
exhale. Shall we say also a glass
of claret? Or some sherry with its
dark star, the smoke blown into the bowl
of the glass, like fog on portentous
morning, the rich man-smell of gabardine
and wool, of money it its gold clip?
Sometimes I wish I had habits
a man wouldn’t kick, faults a good man could
be proud of. I’d be an expatriate from
myself, all ink-pen and paper in a Paris café
where the waiters were elegant and surly,
the women relaxed and extravagant
with their bobbed hair and bonbons, their
perfumed Galoises, their oysters and canapés,
and I’d be writing about war and old losses˜
man things-and not where I am, in this
pristine and sensitive vessel, all
fizzy water, reticence, and care, all reduced
fat and purified air, behind my deprived
computer, where I can’t manage even
a decaf cap, a mild Tiparillo, a glass of
great-taste-less-filling light beer.