The Poets

          - Provincetown; a second-hand account


When Alan Dugan met John Logan,
a straight man and a gay-straight man,
one dead-dry and the other sickly-sweet,
the two of them drank everything
from the table and in the coolers
and stood there staggering drunk
like O’Dionysus and his cousin Paddy McSatyr
while everyone else sat staring
through the iron bars of a forced sobriety
at the two Irish-Americans
bookending an arm’s-deep shelf
of poetry good and bad between them;
and they said a great, loud poetry of curses back and forth
like the raw electricity of god against god,
incoherent, mutually cancelling,
sulfurous songs of self-love
and love for whomever you might let
under your thick, alcohol-oozing skin
one autumn night and the next morning and afternoon
of everyone else’s foul and unwarranted hangover.

*

I heard this story from Judith Shahn, Dugan's wife and Ben Shahn's daughter (all are dead now). Whatever it was she told me has of course been altered. Why write a poem if you're not going to lie a little?

This is, you'll notice, in the category of one-sentence poems (see Frost's "The Silken Tent" for another specimen -- quite different!).

Dugan escaped his alcoholism -- though fairly late in life; Logan never did, and died miserably.