Congrats, Max, especially for Disposals, well worth redipping into. For its range, it's acceptance.
Bill
> On 13 Nov 2014, at 2:23 am, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> My thanks to Anny for posting me twice on Halvard’s blogspot -
>
> http://halvard-johnson.blogspot.it/2014/11/max-richards_7.html
>
> and the second is a piece I’d otherwise have sent this week to poetryetc - she remarks:
>
> I had to publish your other Seattle poem on the Day of the Dead on another page:
>
> http://halvard-johnson.blogspot.it/2014/11/max-richards.html
>
> Thanks again, Anny and behind her, Halvard.
>
> Cheap
>
> My frugal friend Norman
> resolved to live like Thoreau
> though employed where I was,
> both on decent salaries.
>
> Norman taught inter alia
> American literature,
> including Walden,
> sometimes with me.
>
> He’d bring me some trifle
> by Cummings or Williams -
> now isn’t that fine!
> Mostly read Victorians,
>
> the more forgotten
> the better for him.
> Their plots were passed
> on in any chat with him.
>
> He deplored how little
> we asked of students.
> Meeting a new bunch
> one year he said:
>
> for me please write
> a short essay each week.
> Most of his students
> transferred to me.
>
> Some also preferred
> chairs and a table
> to the benches he made
> from scrap planks of wood
>
> on which he served acrid
> tea in mugs from op-shops.
> His weatherboard cottage
> was a short bike ride away.
>
> Every room was full of books,
> with many underfoot.
> Front and back, grass grew long
> around his self-sown trees.
>
> It was wild! He looked wild,
> gleaming through his beard.
> His clothes were from charity
> shops, ill-fitting and worn.
>
> A day came when he confided:
> ‘I now buy op-shop underpants,
> very cheap.’ Only he could wear
> dead men’s undergarments.
>
> What he didn’t spend
> he made sure good causes got,
> confidentially. He did let on
> he’d bought land -
>
> acres not farmable
> down Gippsland way,
> a train trip and a bike ride.
> He wanted it reforested,
>
> trees no-one would harvest.
> As he aged he visited them
> seldom. Last chat we had
> he said the farmer next door
>
> had taken the land off
> his hands, very cheap.
> Privately I called him
> ‘our cut-price Thoreau’.
>
> Tread lightly - that he did.
> I nurtured his wedding gift,
> a gum-tree sapling
> in an old tin, but it died.
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