Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2001 00:12:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Orpheus <cwduff-AT-alcor.concordia.ca>
Subject: Poems of Eugene Vickery [5] (fwd)





---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2001 15:21:04 -0600
From: kent johnson <kljohnson45-AT-HOTMAIL.COM>
To: BRITISH-POETS-AT-JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Poems of Eugene Vickery [5]

The Chemist to His Love [ca. late 1940's]


I love you Mary, and you love me,
Our mutual flame is like the affinity
That does exist between two simple bodies:
I am Potassium to your Oxygen.
No matter that the holy marriage vow
Shall in two days make us one. Big deal: That unity
Is, after all, metaphysical. O
Would that I, my subjunctive Mary,
Were an acid, a living acid; an alkali
Endowed with human sense, that, brought together,
We might both coalesce into one salt,
One homogenous crystal. O that you
Were Carbon, and myself were Hydrogen;
We would unite to form olefiant gas,
And eventually to make a bomb to blow Japan,
Or common coal or naphtha. Would to Heaven
That I were Phosphorous, and you were Lime (note: stop overuse
of subjunctive) And we of Lime composed a Phosphuret!!
I'd be content to be Sulphuric Acid,
So that you, my sweet cunt, might be Soda. In that case
We should be Glauber's Salt. Ezra Pound is now feeling
Like he's Magnesia, while we form what passes as
Epsom, with Two Palmered Lions On A Bridge, while you desire
To Potassium be, I Aqua-fortis, our happy union should that
Compound form, Nitrate of Potash, otherwise known as
Saltpeter, or Louis Untermeyer. And thus, our several
Natures sweetly blent, should decompose the fleshly
*tertium quid*, leaving our souls to all eternity
Amalgamated. Sweet thy name is Johnson and mine
Is Vickery. Wherefore should not we agree to form a
Johnsonate of Vickerysalt? We will.
The day, the happy day is nigh, when feminine Johnson
with manly Vickery shall combine, no matter what the
British in their Spitfires may say.

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