Between the Gardening and the Cookery <br />Comes the brief Poetry shelf; <br />By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology <br />Offers itself. <br /> <br />Critical, and with nothing else to do, <br />I scan the Contents page, <br />Relieved to find the names are mostly new; <br />No one my age. <br /> <br />Like all strangers, they divide by sex: <br />Landscape Near Parma <br />Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex, <br />So does Rilke and Buddha. <br /> <br />“I travel, you see”, “I think” and “I can read' <br />These titles seem to say; <br />But I Remember You, Love is my Creed, <br />Poem for J., <br /> <br />The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter <br />For several seconds; <br />From somewhere in this (as in any) matter <br />A moral beckons. <br /> <br />Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart <br />Or squash it flat? <br />Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; <br />Girls aren’t like that. <br /> <br />We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff <br />Can get by without it. <br />Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough; <br />They write about it. <br /> <br />And the awful way their poems lay them open <br />Just doesn’t strike them. <br />Women are really much nicer than men: <br />No wonder we like them. <br /> <br />Deciding this, we can forget those times <br />We stayed up half the night <br />Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes, <br />And couldn’t write.<br /><br />Kingsley Amis<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/something-nasty-in-the-bookshop/
