There are those who laugh half an hour
because they cannot cry.
Laughter is as ancient as the bloody sun.
I would like to write a history of laughter.
In the Stone Age, the first men laughed with women,
women with women, men with men, some were
thrown out of their caves after all that grunting
and humping because they wanted romance.
There must have been laughter
before marriage vows and last rites.
“We are the only mammals that laugh” is not true,
every living thing sometimes laughs.
Flowers laugh so hard their petals fall.
Gardens are like theatres with comic
and tragic hydrangeas, some roses have thorns,
hollyhocks thrive on beer.
I hear laughing rain after a hot summer day,
laughing crows, doves, nightingales.
If you don’t think maples, oaks, evergreens laugh,
smile and walk in another part of the forest,
come sit with me under a greenwood tree.
I laugh with raccoons who know me.
No one believes there are ghosts who laugh.
Beautiful to think we have God’s word
according to Matthew, according to Mark,
according to John, according to Luke.
I'll play the accordion and sing:
Come and kiss me sweet and sixty,
seventy, eighty, ninety.
I sing a song of my devotion,
I'm a little drunk, be my ocean,
take me on a cruise
around the world. Be my muse,
show me poetry is not complaining,
the truest poetry is the most feigning.
Ocean, come over my bow, let's sail
into the fog up ahead, the future.
Kind winds prevail,
there is no end, there is departure.
On a clear night I sound a foghorn,
I am reborn.
I'm beginning to know who I am,
I give a damn.
Darling ocean, sweet adventure,
I was a gardener, a rake, manure.
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
There was laughter about the time there was light,
laughter and light were good
when God created the heavens and earth.
These days to cross the oceans by ship is out of fashion,
like a little Latin and less Greek at school.
After a four day sail Naples to Palermo, Goethe wrote,
“No one who has never seen himself surrounded
by nothing but the sea can have a true perception
of the world and his own relation to it. . ."
Wordsworth beheld “the sea lay laughing at a distance.”
If water equals time, providing beauty with its double,
let it be. There are water clocks.
Greek and medieval candle clocks
sometimes make a laughing clock:
ha, haha, hahaha, up to twelve.
I wish I could make this verse a laughing clock,
I hear the speechless sun
in a ripple of laughter on water.
* * *
I heard in a confession booth a sinner
laughed so piously he was given absolution.
He did not hail Mary, he laughed with her.
A newborn sinless babe does not laugh.
Far from Bible Proverbs,
the Japanese have a saying, “Letting off a fart
doesn’t make you laugh when you are alone.”
Idle reader, I never heard a snake break wind.
A rattlesnake danced the Twist in my house,
went off without enchantment in search of a charmer.
Here is my fairy tale, The Birthday Cake :
you take six eggs, beat the yolks and whites,
a little flour, ten minutes in the oven,
laughter makes the batter rise,
strawberries and cream for shortcake.
In her house a mother hen missed her eggs,
she jumped on top of the cake, sat on her beaten eggs,
wept on the pretty cake in the center of the table.
Outside in the yard a rooster mounted
a New Hampshire Red. The guests laughed.
* * *
Far from Greenwich Village, I remember
I was in Rome, a Bernini fountain, in Piazza Navona,
water laughing I drank out of the mouth of a satyr.
The satyr kissed me.
It was Epiphany, when shepherds come to Rome
from the campagna playing their goatskin bagpipes.
I laughed, “When they kill me, I prefer to keep my skin.
Make a bagpipe of my belly.”
I prefer being blown than fingered like a harp or clavier.
I tell you for a laugh, Kunitz quit
at ninety-seven, his daughter told me
it's time to accept his dying, his death.
He said, without voice, "I'm very tired, need rest."
She made him oatmeal, then cream of wheat.
I gave him lobster bisque, massaged his feet.
He lived another three years and two hundred
and eighty-eight legendary days:
Silenus laughed with Dionysus,
they drank laughing wine in a dazzling goblet.
A prison guard shouted, “There are laughing murderers,
what's funnier than a dead body, 160 lbs.
of cold meat, four buckets of water, a pocket of salt?"
Chick Webb could do it—I’ve heard a laughing jazz band,
black laughter instead of drums.
Louis Armstrong scat laughed—he learned from a Jewish
cantor neighbor. Laughter is ancient as the sun.
The Chinese word for laughter is made of two characters:
the character for sky beneath the character for grass.
Translated in Chinese a laughing Falstaff
might give you a dancing Falstaff tripping on a sunset,
upside down cows and sheep grazing in the sky.
What is the moon doing rising below my feet?
Laugh me to scorn.
“Weeping might endure all night,
but joy cometh in the morning.”
