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THE FUNNY PLACE
Richard F. Snow
(poetry/history) 70 pages, 5 1/2 x 8", paperbound,
ISBN 1-887478-08-6, $13
A blank verse history of Coney Island, by the author of Coney Island: A Postcard Journey to the City of Fire. Winner of the Frank O'Hara Poetry Prize, 1975.
Snow's tale "moves forward on the waltz rhythms of carrousel organs
heard in intervals between the surf and the din of the boardwalk."
-John Ashbery
from THE FUNNY PLACE
1
Upon the road from gentle Baltimore,
By his enormous brass-bound touring car
Stood Death, and watched the sky a little while,
Beside a frogpond, near a tulip tree
That grew from a gazebo, painted white,
And no large house to watch it; all alone
Beneath the halted, strumming afternoon.
A yellow-and-bright-green excursion train
Came hissing through that firecracker month,
And winter had been there, before the train,
And loosened ties and spikes
So that the pennant-bristling engine lurched
More than it should have, but the tree-splashed day
Was gorgeous, and the lavatory worked
In the last car, so people didn't mind.
A Mr. Carney Simms was on the train,
And tilting in his large, seersucker lap
Was chicken, fried, in a blue cardboard box,
Wrapped in wax paper, so that salted grease
Would not disturb the apple and the cake.
He watched the dazzled leaves slide by the glass
And then saw Death beside his touring car.
He sneezed but didn't wake his sleeping wife,
And when he looked again the leaves were back.
Death pulled on gloves and climbed into his car,
Its steamship gearshift brass and four feet high,
And headlamps big as snaredrums that would glow
Luminous as ice on the deep roads.
That night, when Mr. Simms had gone to bed
He watched the liquid breeze from off the sea
Breathing the hotel curtains into life.
It was a day of triumphs; he had won
A kewpie doll and caught a handsome bass,
And now he lay and thought of seeing Death,
And envied him his handsome motor-car.