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Gloom 
Prerequisite: Gogol's "The Overcoat"
On rainy days and drizzly
you'll find him working busily,
half-starved, unslept, alone,
nosing a big grindstone.
No sunlit meadows tempt him,
titillate, and preempt him;
for you know, friends, a jerk
like him just loves to work,
his lifestyle mean and tacky
like Gogol's weird Akaky.
One mustn't, then, assume
it's all unpleasant, gloom.
Akaky loved to copy,
just copy: silly, soppy!
No thought, no grand creating;
just slavish imitating:
as Aristotle called it,
the play of children. Scald it
and boil it, that potato!
Despicable, said Plato.
We need social awareness,
a sense of cosmic fairness,
maturity, the balm
of philosophic calm.
Akaky lost or hid it.
His childishness undid it,
his mockery, his glory.
It's all there in the story:
true symbol, no mere gimmick,
Gogol himself, the mimic.
The overcoat to aid him
and comfort him betrayed him.
It-she-read and believe!—
caressed him, soft as Eve,
poor man, whose blessed day
never knew work, just play.
Akaky was her Adam,
she his resplendent madam.
Did God, who made her, fail her?
Him God, that one-eyed tailor?
Cursing in drunk dishevel,
Petrovitch was The Devil:
the story of The Fall
told truly after all.
Once Eve was fashioned, groomed,
Adam, who'd slept, was doomed:
all men fated to hate her;
The Devil, her creator.
No longer staying home,
copying from some tome,
he took her to a party,
elegant, gay, and arty:
left his true play for vanity
and Petersburg's inanity.
As always, such a change'll
bring an Avenging Angel.
Stumbling homeward, where
his path crossed a vast square—
what tore off her caress?
Petersburg's emptiness.
Feminists, do not rage;
I just quote Gogol's page.
Dig him up, desecrate him,
and let him know you hate him,
but my muse, don't berate her.
I'm just an imitator.
Addled, a little wacky,
I too am like Akaky.
O cursed be he who dotes
on senseless overcoats!
He merits his distress:
messed with his blessedness.
Indeed the day is gloomy.
Indeed it's getting to me.
I undervalue comfort
who often sing and hum for't.
We cynics know earth becks
and calls. Its voice is sex.
Because it's many-girled,
there's beauty in the world.
That kind thought came my way
here on a rainy day.
One mustn't, then, assume
it's all unpleasant, gloom.
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Richard Moore's
tenth book of poems, The Naked Scarecrow, is to be published by Odyssey
Press in December, 1999. (His first book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
for Poetry.) He has also published a novel, a book of criticism, and
translations of ancient Greek and Roman plays. Over six-hundred of his poems and
prose pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly,
and over eighty other magazines.