Too cruel, the poet thought, to bring Charles
Dodgson back.
Let Lewis Carroll survive with Wonderland and
Looking Glass,
those romps through the indignities of childhood.
Let’s just think
of the Cheshire Cat, of croquet and the delightful
violence
of using hedgehogs for balls, flamingos for mallets.
He was courtly, an Oxford don, one of the great
photographers
of his century. Should it matter that children were
his only subjects,
young girls, some nude, and all of them his most
important friends?
He’d pay for that in Pomona or Absecon, in any
small town.
Or worse, be drawn in the evenings, if not all day,
to the Internet,
titillated into finally acting out what must have
been his dreams.
And wouldn’t he be forced into therapy, shrunk
and otherwise
reduced, thrust into the aridities of an examined
life?
Yet the poet wanted him back, so much wanted to
have him nearby,
this man who made the Snark and Jabberwock,
who’d liberated
children’s books from moralists. Every day for days
the poet weighed
the frabjous, delicate goods and bads of Dodgson’s
return,
then with great sadness turned him away for good.
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