When people asked what he did, Donald Long’s standard riposte was, “I’m a mechanic of the dream.” Meaning, he was a projectionist.

I can hear him, in the next room but one, typing away. An answer to Pamela’s Special Delivery letter perhaps? Or lists of moneymaking projects. Possibly even a story, or a revised out line forPopcorn, in which he will refute the errors of our age.

Generations on generations of German sound
Engineers have taken you at your word.
Here are the dials they use: Play, Record,

Like antelope bounding across
the wide lawns of Africa
are these flames that leap

The vagaries of taste might swerve.
Suddenly, leaving you disaudienced.

Windows un-Windexed
Sheets not laundered, itchy crotch
I’ve myself to blame

At first she is only mildly annoyed: the car
won't start, it's happened before. She'll phone
her husband—what is his name?—at his office,

These are those same trees you saw six months ago.
I’ve drawn them in a way that will explain
Not only their nature, but the nature of snow,

One moment the sky is its usual dark,
Dimensionless self, and the next, with a double burst—
Two spreading spheres of radiance, phosphor

All summer long
while other trees
reached for more

Two sharp eminences with a valley between
Through which the erratic witness of a loosened tongue
Flows to the sea: Mount M__________. Mark it well.

This will be your office, Mr. Blank,
While you remain attached to the Poetry .
Division of the Department of Mediocrity.

Castilian countryside.
Bleak with furze

We must all open ourselves to the influence of Love.
We must all let its fleshless fingers caress our skin.

Rectangularity controls the setting
Of tables, the organization of paint
On canvas, and the sport of ping-pong.

So all this talk, since Whistler,
about the primacy and purity of
Form is balderdash.

One only needs to give the ocean some thought and it becomes describable as a street of houses:

Something terrible has happened
but I don’t know what. The letter
that arrived this morning will say no more

I envy them and cannot find
Any comfort in my own uncertainty.

Expressing hope we might in time come back
To have our teeth pulled and enjoy the rack.

I am this haunting music. Never look
Beneath the mask. There is a monster there—

The       Joyful Feelings       met you as
Yesterday emerged from        the tiny windows
outside Tiffany’s        My rough

Tom Disch’s poem “Donna Reed in the Old Scary House” appeared in our Fall 1995 issue. A prolific poet, novelist, science-fiction writer, and author of children’s books—including The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances—Disch fre…