The Poet-Laureate of Sussex County

by Arthur McMaster

has little or nothing good to say
about the Poet–Laureate of neighboring Newton,

blaming her for their having been caught
some years ago, in flagrante, as it were,

in the back room of their shared Borders
bookstore following one reading together; not

that she was all that ready to overlook
how he was the one to insist they read Keats,

and how everyone knows how that kind of stuff
turns out — all that business about kissing

and eternal bliss. That need to “lie together
in the heath.” Or how he’d promised to flesh out

her fulsome abstractions. Forgetting how
she had boldly praised his startling enjambment.