‘Of a Feather’ and Other Poems by C.B. Anderson

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Of a Feather

Professor Swann was new among the fonts
of knowledge chugging up the tenure track;
he’d earned his place among the college fac-
ulty with bold views and a fierce response
to critics. Apropos to ambience
the ivied walls lent, students dared attack
his points with blatant relish for their lack
of proper homage—Vive la résistance!

The old department chair who’d vouched for Swann
one year ago could scarce contain his chuckling:
How fitting that the fledgling now must don

the feathers of his elders, short on truckling
admirers whom he could impose upon,
forgetting he’d once been the ugly duckling.

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The Four-Color Problem

—trying to prove that no more than four colors are
required to color the regions of any map so that no
two adjacent regions have the same color (proven in
1976 by Appel and Haken at The University of Illinois)

Grim symbols grapple in the gaslight, much
entangled, like a nest of snakes, a rash
of colors bleeding on a map; they touch
across established ink-line borders, clash
and clamor in a reckless street fight. Such

disorder isn’t easy to explain
within the canon of topology,
for reconciling meaning with the pain
requires some recondite theology
or garden-variety legerdemain.

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Buying Time

Let us pretend our hearts are in the right
places, and let us set aside the small
differences that occur no matter what,
even when things are going well. Tonight
I want a level playground, to rebut
ingrained assumptions which have cast a pall

across our once well-lighted neighborhood,
the area we’d thought we settled down
in, not just settled for. It’s no surprise
our former dreams fell flat; for all the good
our wishes did, we might have closed our eyes
and picked at random any run-down town

we’d never heard of, which is precisely
the problem: everything that we assumed
was based on inexperience. The lot
we blithely mortgaged might’ve served nicely
in a short-term occupancy, but not
for permanence. From the start we were doomed.

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C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden.  Hundreds of his poems have appeared in scores of print and electronic journals out of North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Australia and India.  His collection, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.