Three poems, by Mark Young

 

The Petrified Forest

Humphrey Bogart was Princess Diana's
seventh cousin. When he died, Lauren
Bacall placed a small gold whistle in-
side his casket. At Diana's funeral, the
Queen's sister, Princess Margaret, un-
like the Queen, did not bow her head.
The cremated remains of Lauren Bacall
are kept at Forest Lawn, the same ceme-
tery as her husband Humphrey, but in a
different area. Princess Diana is buried
on an island in the family estate. Reports
say that the area is not well looked after.
Like Lauren Bacall, Princess Margaret
was cremated, purportedly because there
was no room for a traditional coffin left
in the royal vault at Windsor Castle. Nev-
ertheless, Queen Elizabeth was interred
there when she passed. No one of note is
known to be buried in the 200 million
year old petrified forest in northeastern
Arizona, but the trees, however, are said
to be quite spectacular & worth a visit. The
film was the first that Bogart starred in.

 

 

The gopher ficcione

The tensile strength of gophers
is measured by the depth to which
they build their holes. The record,
established at the 1936 Olympic
Games in Berlin, & recorded for
posterity by Lotte Riefenstahl, still
stands, at just under 2 meters. "We
should get you to build our bunkers"
said Adolf Hitler as he presented the
team with their gold medals. "Cert-
ainly showed those moles & voles
how things should be done" said the
Gopher King at the press conference
that followed. The next two Olympics
were canceled due to the war. When
the Games resumed in London in 1948,
the rules for that particular event had
been changed. Semi-aquatic animals
could now compete, so Egypt was
entering a team of Nile crocodiles; &
since (a) they were reputed to dig
burrows that went down 12 meters
& (b) they had a particular fondness
for small fry, the gophers decided
to follow Shakespeare's maxim that
the better part of valor is discretion
& refused to defend their title. They re-
tained their record, however, under a
clause in the OCOG rules that states
if criteria for a particular event change
dramatically, then a record achieved
under the old conditions would be
considered to be held in perpetuity.

  

Imprison'd

has an anagram in primnoids, a
form of deep-sea corals which are
quite common & characteristically
found in seamounts & deepwater 

coral banks. Their ancestral colony
shape is that of a dichotomous
planar, meaning an organism or
structure that forks into two equal 

parts repeatedly while growing
flat in a single two-dimensional
plane.There is, unfortunately, no
one anagram for that description.

 

 

Mark Young was born in Aotearoa / New Zealand but now lives in a small town on traditional Juru land in North Queensland. He has been publishing poetry for over sixty-six years, & is the author of around eighty books. Recent titles are From the Cave’s jukebox & synecdoche, both from Sandy Press, California, & Curtains from Pat Nolan's Neo-Mimeo Editions, also California. A new collection of visual work, pheromones, is due to be published by Sandy Press.