This poem about my time at Washington University in St. Louis is probably too niche to publish in a journal, so I offer it here. The wonderful poet Howard Nemerov taught at WashU for a number of years (sadly, before my time), and the trees that lined the walk to the library were immortalized in his poem “The Consent.” What Nemerov’s poem doesn’t mention is that the rotting fruit of the gingkoes in the poem make a terrible stench every fall.

So here’s my poem about Nemerov’s gingkoes, dedicated to my grad school buddies, especially Rick Godden and Kevin Kalish:

Howard’s Trees

Remember how the famous poet’s trees

(Immortalized in verse for how they all

In unison defrocked without degrees)

Let drop an awful vomit stench each fall?

The ginkgoes pooped fermenting fruit, which stank

Up campus for a month, the whole outdoors

Awash in pungent, fumy air that sank

Like smoker’s reek into the quad’s stone pores.

Who would have thought those lovely trees ablaze

Along the walk in yellow touched with red

Could ooze a funk like after frat soirees

When empties pocked the lawn like scattered dead?

But one can’t blithely ax a poet’s tree,

As if one’s cutting lines from tangled verse.

So Howard’s ginkgoes stand there still, and we

Are gone, like leaves the campus winds disperse.