A decade before his heart burst,
Robert Lowell invented a drink
called The French Revolution:
bourbon and water. The bourbon
represents The Bourbons, iced.
The water is the peasantry
diluting aristocratic blood
through the gruff desanguination
of the Reign of Terror. I drink,
every evening, one of Lowell's drinks,
In Memorium.

Tonight the lilt
of snowfall in the woods excites
my taste for expensive liquor.
Twenty-year-old whiskey's good enough,
I guess, but only in a cut-glass
tumbler that winks the lamplight
like the blade of the guillotine
separating mind from body.
I drink, as always, in memory
of those who have gone before me,
friends and teachers, favorite authors,
and my father lying under six
feet of Connecticut Valley loam
frozen so hard the Judgment Day
will have to wait till spring.

Slumped
before the TV, book in my lap,
I absorb the news and weather
forecast, reading the poetry
of a thick-necked San Francisco thug
with a flair for cacophony.
In my fist The French Revolution
gleams a flirtatious amber gleam.
I wonder if the distilled hemlock
ingested by Socrates looked
comparably exciting. Snow pads
and paws at the picture window.
The alto of the TV cackles
as I consider how various
are the ways of the world, how hard
and yet how secret and thrilling
to live alone in one's skin.