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Catalogue Raisonné of My Refrigerator Door

By George Starbuck 1931–1996 George Starbuck

for Joshua Starbuck, master of montage

A Caledonian megalith.

A tinted bather from Cape Ann.

The 1937 kith

and kin of a Kentuckian

beside their Model T sedan.

The Celts. Who set me this arith-

metic of icons? Who began

by pasting in Bob Dylan? Zith-

erpicking rhinestone charlatan.

He tries to be American.

Who tries to be American

as hard as him? Not Aly Khan.

Not George F. Babbitt the Zenith-

ophiliac Zenithian.

As sure as God made Granny Smith

a pricier-sounding product than

the Winesap or the Jonathan,

there is a mystery and myth

to being an American,

and being an American

compounds it. Kurosawa-san,

steady my Nikon while I pan

across the porches of forsyth-

iabedizened Mattapan

in search of ... dot dot dot ... the plan,

the weltanschauung, the ethnith-

ifying principle a pith

helmeted Oxbridge fancy-dan

could pounce on like a fiend from Ran

and authenticate forthwith.

The cromlech beetles o’er the frith.

The ultimate American

possession rattles his Kal-Kan,

Prince, you’re a prince. A dog a man

can talk to. What this caravan

of adumbrations and antith-

esises panteth for is Dith

Pran and the long-lost Mrs. Pran:

Far-fetched, tenacious, captious: fan

tabulously American.

George Starbuck, “Catalogue Raisonné of My Refrigerator Door Of Late” from The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades. Copyright © 2003 by University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa). Reprinted with the permission of The University of Alabama Press.

Source: Poetry (October 1987).

Biography

George Starbuck's songs of protest are usually concerned with love, war, and the spiritual temper of the times. John Holmes believes that "there hasn't been as much word excitement . . . for years," as one finds in Bone Thoughts. Harvey Shapiro points out that Starbuck's work is attractive because of its "witty, improvisational surface, slangy and familiar address, brilliant aural quality . . .," and adds that Starbuck may . . .

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