(Auden’s hundred)
Your first words that  I read were “Look, stranger,”

          which really stuck.

You hymned environmental danger

and illness welling up from bottled anger

          in  the out-of-luck.
Stranger than any of us was your

          thanatology:

mental mapping was a chart of war

but lust for the diagonal metaphor

          fed your geology.
Ominous uniforms and the sexy furs

          you parsed as threat

like acid rain in silted aquifers

the Romans left. From gaunt commissioners

          an each-way bet
gave your calciferous frontier the chance

          either of Left or Right.

You didn’t much approve of France

for their symbolist poetic dance

          was a downright
draught of colorless Coca-Cola,

          not for grown-ups,

a canker in the thinker’s molar.

You could have liked Savonarola,

          but in his cups.
You’d have known the date of each bubonic

          outbreak, or heresy;

you knew that most blokes were moronic

and your blow-job poem was merely platonic –

          well, ostensibly.
Ambiguous Europe has its weather still.

          Expert in exile,

you turned the twilight into chlorophyll

soodling along beside the sacred rill

          mile after lucky mile.