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Two Poems by Michael Wilt
Found Poem
The Habits of the Bullfrog
Henry D. Thoreau ---
Henry D. Thoreau.
His name ain’t no more Henry D. Thoreau
than my name is Henry D. Thoreau.
And everybody knows it, and he knows it.
His name’s Da-a-vid Henry
and it ain’t never been nothing but Da-a-vid Henry.
And he knows that!
Why, one morning I went out in my field
across there to the river, and there,
beside that old mud pond,
was standing Da-a-vid Henry,
and he wasn’t doin’ nothin’ but just standin’ there ---
and when I came back at noon,
there he was standin’ with his hands behind him
just lookin’ down into that pond,
and after dinner when I come back again
if there wan’t Da-a-vid standin’ there
just like as if he had been there all day,
gazin’ down into that pond,
and I stopped and looked at him and I says,
“Da-a-vid Henry, what air you a-doin’?”
And he didn’t turn his head
and he didn’t look at me.
He kept on lookin’ down at that pond,
and he said,
as if he was thinkin’ about
the stars in the heavens,
“Mr. Murray,
I’m a-studyin’ ---
the habits ---
of the bullfrog!”
And there that darned fool had been standin’ ---
Related by Mrs. Daniel Chester French in Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), and quoted in Walter Harding, ed., Thoreau as Seen by His Contemporaries (New York: Dover Books, 1989).
Mysteries of Art
A painting dropped from the wall of the big museum
walked out and took up a new life all its own.
I can’t recall if it was a delicious Modigliani nude
or a luminous Vermeer
or a swirling Van Gogh
but there it went,
from its place on the third floor
through the galleries
and down the stairs,
through the echoing lobby
and down the wide outside steps
peopled by those tired and lunching,
curious and vacationing,
to Fifth Avenue.
Lacking exact change for the bus
it hopped into a waiting yellow cab
and headed south.
To Times Square? The Village or Soho?
To one of the airports to seek
its place of origin?
The yellow cab disappeared
into the traffic of Fifth
and no one but that driver
knows the painting’s destination.
I surmise that he
was sworn to secrecy,
or didn’t care,
or forgot,
and I imagine that
he received an ample tip,
as one would expect from such a classic fare.
I crossed Central Park
and went over to Amsterdam
for coffee and a bookshop.
© Michael Wilt
This page published January 2005
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