O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound
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About this ebook
Garrison Keillor is known the world over for his funny, folksy stories set in his beloved Lake Wobegon, and the legendary radio and stage performances of A Prairie Home Companion. And although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, this volume forges a new path for him, as a poet of light verse.
Here, Keillor writes with his characteristic combination of humor and insight on love, modernity, nostalgia, politics, religion, and other facets of daily life. His verses are charming and playful, locating sublime song within the humdrum of being human—and “as in his best-selling fiction, the subject matter is the (very funny) stuff of the lumpen-bourgeois blues” (Booklist).
Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor, born in Anoka, Minnesota, in 1942, is an essayist, columnist, blogger, and writer of sonnets, songs, and limericks, whose novel Pontoon the New York Times said was “a tough-minded book . . . full of wistfulness and futility yet somehow spangled with hope”—no easy matter, especially the spangling. Garrison Keillor wrote and hosted the radio show A Prairie Home Companion for more than forty years, all thanks to kind aunts and good teachers and a very high threshold of boredom. In his retirement, he’s written a memoir and a novel. He and his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, live in Minneapolis and New York.
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O, What a Luxury - Garrison Keillor
GARRISON KEILLOR
O, What a Luxury
VERSES
LYRICAL, VULGAR,
PATHETIC & PROFOUND
V-1.tifgrove press • new york
Copyright © 2013 by Garrison Keillor
Jacket design by Tom Daly and Charles Rue Woods; Jacket illustrations
by Tom Daly
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2161-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9303-2
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
To
Ogden Nash, Cole Porter, John Updike,
Ira Gershwin, Roger Miller, Roy Blount, Jr.
Masters of the House
CONTENTS
1 WAS ETHEL MERMAN A MORMON?
Unification
Billy the Kid
Nobody Loves You
Episcopalian
(R.I.P. Fats Waller)
Onion Soup
Mormons
On the Beach
Thong Song
Newt
Epithalamion
On the Road
Hale Bopp
In Love
The Fabulous Fox
Chivalry
Ode to the Women on the Mural
at the State Theatre,
Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis
Kansas
Urology
Show Business
Doxology
Psalm
2 A MAJOR FAUX PAS PROHIBITED BY LAW
O, What a Luxury
A Question
Manners
At the Grammys
Frequent Flyer
Winter Guests
Amazon
Lethargy
Ocean Crossing
3 I LIVE IN THIS DESOLATE SPOT
BECAUSE YOU DO NOT
Seattle
San Francisco
L.A.
Times Square
Katz’s
City Life
Reader
Limericks: New York
Papa and His Baby See Manhattan
Minnesota Rouser
Case Studies
Minnesota
Why I Live in Minnesota
That’s Me
A True Story
The Plumber
Bus Children
Eau Claire
T. S. Eliot Rock
Elegiac
Perversity
Home on the Plains
4 BENEATH THEIR SHINY DOMES
THEY CONTAIN YOUR CHROMOSOMES
Love You Dear
Slow Days of Summer
Love Poem
The Front Seat
Wedding March from Lohengrin
Wedding Recessional
Cicadas
Fatherhood
First Trimester
Forbidden Delights
The Course of Life
Mother’s Poem
Graduation Song
5 THANKS BE TO GOD FOR KEEPING US SMALL
Publicity
How to Write a Letter
to Your Mother in Seven Days
Lutheran Story
Fundamentalist Rag
Lutheranism Explained
Redemption
Social Mobility
Song of October 12
Unspoken Prayer
Jim Flam Steps Aside
6 SECONDARY NEURONS OF
THE CEREBRAL PROMONTORY
Birthday Poem for Mozart
Birthday Poem for F.S.F.
Address to the Harvard
Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa,
Sanders Theatre, June 2008
For Ray and Orrell on
Their 50th Anniversary
For Johnny
Baker’s Dozen
7 A REPUBLICAN LADY OF KNOXVILLE
The Owl and the Pussycat
The Fox Went Out
on a Chilly Night
A Tragic Song
Another Tragic Song
O My Darling Clementine
Nikolina
Whoopitiyiyo California
Class Warfare
Nine More
8 THE PLANET REVOLVING ON ITS AXIS
Winter Blues
Opera
Beethoven
Your Fault
One Thing After Another
Advice
Back in the Day
Independence Day
Dark Skies
1
WAS ETHEL MERMAN
A MORMON?
UNIFICATION
The Mississippi at its mouth
Joins the Gulf of Mexico,
The west wind mixes with the south,
High pressure with the low.
Nothing in nature stands apart,
All things rendezvous—
And I would like to mingle with you.
Intermingled, intertwined,
This is what I have in mind,
A sudden urge
To merge.
The compound that is chlorophyll
Formed as the light increases
Makes every little flower thrill
With photosynthesis.
The morning glory mingles
With the honeysuckle vine.
Come wrap your little tendrils around mine.
I’ve been lonely as a cloud,
Drifting high and small and proud,
Lonely as a limestone butte—
Handsome, noble, destitute,
And I need you, I confess.
Let’s coalesce.
BILLY THE KID
Billy the Kid
Didn’t do half of what they said he did.
He rustled cattle, I guess it’s true,
But bad men was who they belonged to.
He killed some guys, but if you knew ’em
You’d say they had it coming to ’em.
Billy the Kid went on the run
Down to Mesilla in 1881.
Sheriff Pat Garrett put on the heat
And came to the ranch of Billy’s friend Pete
But it wasn’t Billy who was shot by Pat,
It was someone wearing his pants and hat.
Billy the Kid was miles away
In Santa Fe with flowers in his hair
And I know cuz I was there.
He made a fortune in fermented juices
And built a mansion in Las Cruces,
Changed his name to William Bonney,
Wrote Way Down Upon the Swanee
And he may have been guilty to a degree
But he was always good to me
And generous to my family.
Always sent us a Christmas turkey
From Albuquerque
And chocolate candy
From the Rio Grande
And an embroidered pillow
From Amarillo.
I spoke at his funeral long ago.
He was living in San Luis Obispo,
Big house
On the beach.
I gave a nice speech.
People were impressed.
They didn’t know he was
The most famous outlaw in the West,
Feared from Tucson to Reno.
They knew him as Rudy Valentino.
NOBODY LOVES YOU
Once I lived a life of some renown,
People looked up to me in this town.
They listened to what I had to say.
They named a sandwich for me at Bud’s Café.
Then they passed a no-smoking law: no smokes, zero, nada.
And I became persona non grata.
Nobody loves me
When I take a smoke.
I pull out