It Was Enough
To Raise Your Hair To Hear That Variegated And Enormous
Unanimous Caterwaul Burst Out!
With so big and so derisive
an audience as that, a suffer wouldn't emit a sound though
you pulled his head off.
The surgeons said that pretty
often a patient was compelled to laugh, in the midst
of his pangs, but that had never caught one crying out,
after the open-air exhibition was instituted."
Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death,
death suggested skeletons - and so, by a logical process
the conversation melted out of one of these subjects
and into the next, until the topic of skeletons raised up
Nicodemus Dodge out of the deep grave in my memory where he
had lain buried and forgotten for twenty-five years.
When I was a boy in a printing-office in Missouri,
a loose-jointed, long-legged, tow-headed, jeans-clad
countrified cub of about sixteen lounged in one day,
and without removing his hands from the depths
of his trousers pockets or taking off his faded ruin
of a slouch hat, whose broken rim hung limp and ragged
about his eyes and ears like a bug-eaten cabbage leaf,
stared indifferently around, then leaned his hip
against the editor's table, crossed his mighty brogans,
aimed at a distant fly from a crevice in his upper teeth,
laid him low, and said with composure:
"Whar's the boss?"
"I am the boss," said the editor, following this curious
bit of architecture wonderingly along up to its clock-face
with his eye.
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