He doesn’t have the time, he pleads,
For long and patient wooing.
A mortal man with urgent needs,
He would be up and doing.

He’d worship for two hundred years
Your left breast, then your right,
He swears, but can’t because he fears
Death’s swift-encroaching night.

He notes how brief are human lives.
He says you mustn’t tease,
For once that chariot arrives,
You’ll have no days to seize.

Though you know joining him in bed
Is what you’ll likely do,
You’re certain romance will be dead
Before the two of you.

*****

Chris O’Carroll writes: “Dorothy Parker’s verse paints her enthusiastic about sex but skeptical about romance. I wanted to incorporate both of those outlooks into her imagined response to Marvell’s famous come-hither argument.”

‘Dorothy Parker on Andrew Marvell’ was first published in Snakeskin.

Chris O’Carroll is the author of four books of poems — The Joke’s on Me, Abracadabratude, Quantum Creed, and the newly published Ridiculous Positions. He is a Light magazine featured poet and a contributor to Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, Extreme Sonnets, New York City Haiku, and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, among other collections.