Goatee
At writers’ workshops we mingle
and greet, shifting
chapbooks, plates of
cheese,
plastic cups of
Pinot gris.
We take stock of who’s there.
Who’s reading.
Who’s published.
Who has, sotto voce,
sold out,
gotten blotto.
The men in the room,
poets and auteurs,
are smartly, artfully
groomed, pomaded
and plumed.
To a man, to a cheek
each sports a goatee.
Some grizzled,
some chiseled.
But all, it is whispered,
are decidedly, tidily
whiskered.
They move about the room,
an erudite herd, stroking
chins
and the tweedy, needy
egos of bearded
twins.
Some sardonically spiked,
some sagely Van Dyke’d,
some scraggly, rough-hewn,
but none are immune
to the bookish goatee,
which seems to be de rigueur
for the male litterateur.