More Unpublished Couplets from "The Two Davids" [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

David Shapiro and I corresponded by couplets in February 2003. Here are some previously unpublished exanmples. And here is a conversation with David Shapiro conducted by Kent Johnson http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-shapiro-d-ivb-kent.shtml

Subj:    Kenneth said: We always make our own mayonnaise          
Date:   2/12/2003 11:22:50 AM Eastern Standard Time       

From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

Good couplets make their point almost at once.
Like kicking a habit or calling your children runts.

The evil is done, and you are flawed forever.
But the couplet keeps returning, like Shelley's river.

An off‑rhyme doesn't daunt it, not the couplet.
We know whose dog we are, we rise and shit.

We could have said "we urinate" but we didn't.
The couplet seems to end with "Good riddance."

Oh Kenneth loved the couplet in Al Pope.
He said my taste at fifteen gave him hope.

Oh Janice, he said once, make mayonnaise.
This genius likes his Pope‑‑what higher praise.

I was fifteen‑‑had never downed such stuff.
His home‑made mayonnaise was strange enough.  DS, 2 / 12 /03

 

Re: The consistency of the couplet: each couplet consists
2/14/03
From: DCLEHMAN
To: DaJoShap

[Sometimes six suffice]

Each couplet consists of an adult and a child.
I shall bring my lunch pail and dine in the wild.

Each couplet consists of a woman and a man,
But which is which? Who’s the European, who the American?

From the time we are teens we attempt to link
With others who exist because they think.

So I walk to the edge and I walk back alone
Except for the chirp of a cell phone.

Each couplet composes a contradiction
And resolves it like an uncanny prediction.>> DL, 2 / 14 / 03

 

My wife's mother is dying, innocent And who scapes whipping in this Tenement  

Date:   2/13/2003 9:01:09 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

<< A couplet comes down on you like death's storm.
Afterwards, Dave, you're never quite so warm.

A couplet edges downwards like black snow.
But so dramatic! like snow in a Noh.

My mother's wife is dying‑‑innocent.
But who ‘scapes whipping in this Tenement?

You were a couplet, Lady, all day long.
At evening, you're a chorus for no song.

Then you were born, or was it just red clay?
Where are you? is the question of our day.

My wife's sweet Mother lay there without mind.
Was it a home, a hospice? Were we blind?

We want our beds to change, but our disease?
My wife could drive us home, like a white rose.    >> DS, 2 / 14 / 03

 

Re: Like a white rose, or like red clay

from: DCLEHMAN
to: DaJoShap

I speak of my mother who called to console
Me when Sinatra died at 82. She said he wasn’t old.

In May ‘98 my mother was eighty three
Though she liked to tell people she was eighty, only.

After the female moon departed, leaving blood
In the snow, we left our nostalgia for the mud.

I have a new song, and it’s not a blues song,
You wake up, it’s spring, and you can’t go wrong.

What happened to that song? Where did it go,
That dream in a shabby dress I used to know?

We’ve got a right to sing the blues, to sign
The picture we can’t finish, to dash off the line.

Youth is the place where you greet the day with lust
And pledge your trust, but thence in the end comes disgust.  DL, 2 / 15 / 03

 

Re: away, so I claim "eight" expansively: Protest and Fiona Shaw  
Date:   2/15/2003 6:17:18 PM Eastern Standard Time         
From:   DaJoShap       
To:       DCLEHMAN

I forgive you David Lehman for being away.
Now write a couplet or I'll protest, pray.

I forgive you Lehman deep in jet lag or leg.
I saw the protests early and disagree to beg.

Billionaires for Bush was witty: a few others.
Susan Sarandon, Poitier, a few mothers.

I tried to get my young son arrested.
But his mother took him to Medea‑‑busted.

Medea spritzed big droplets on her Jason.
I bowed my head to the Irish‑Greco version.

I wouldn't want the part of bloodied child!
Psychoanalytically, I think it wild.

I want the part of the princess, off stage.
Pretty, burnt to death, welded to Dad in old age.

What a death! Have you heard of anything like it?
Or is it just napalm, our old friend Ike that.  – DS, 2 / 15 / 03

photo by Chris Felver; copyright (c) 1999 by Chris Felver.

Comments

[Frederick G Kushner]

These are so much fun

[David Lehman]

Thanks very much, Fred.