I interviewed the legendary poet X. J. Kennedy on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer. Kennedy gave me permission to use this poem in the LYRICAL SOMERVILLE.

From X. J. Kennedy’s website:

“This year will see two new XJK books.  The comic novel A Hoarse Half-human Cheer will be out this fall in an e-book from Curtis Brown Unlimited and a paperback from CreateSpace.  It’s set in 1946 at the College of St. Cassian of Imola (named for a medieval martyr whose students stabbed him to death with their pens), suddenly expanded to twenty times its size by an influx of ex-GIs.   Unknown to the good priests who run the place, its business manager is a Mafia capo using the school as a front for a racket in war surplus materials.  Other main characters: a 17-year-old assistant mortician, a hard-boiled priest with a drinking problem, and a redheaded bombshell of a biology instructor who finds “nymphomania … a heavy cross to bear.”   The other new book will be Fits of Concision: Collected Poems of Six or Fewer Lines, coming in October from Grolier Poetry Press, the publishing arm of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop of Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. A paperback, it will contain 334 brief poems written over seven decades: lyrics and story poems, epigrams, epitaphs, haiku, poems of no special kind; on the themes of sex, the ages of man, poets, and more. Order from grolierpoetrybookshop.org (phone 617-547-4648) or from online book dealers.”

An Aged Wino’s Counsel to a Young Man on the Brink of Marriage

A two-quart virgin on my lap,
With hands that shook I peeled her cap
And filched a kiss that warmed me so,
I raised my right hand, swore I do,
And merged our fleshes, I and she,
In mutual indignity.

Now when I hear of wives that freeze,
Bitter of lip with icebound knees,
Who’ll play high-card for social bets
And lose, and feed you fish croquettes,
Who’ll nap all day and yak all night
What Ruth told Min—now who was right?—
Who’ll count with glee your falling hairs
But brood a week on one of theirs,
Who’ll see your parkerhouse poke out
Before they take a stitch, who put
At change of moon, as I hear tell,
I say, son, wed you half so well.

— X. J Kennedy

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To have your work considered for the LYRICAL send it to:
dougholder@post.harvard.edu