Best Poems - Poets & Poetry

“Rimbaud and Verlaine, precious pair of poets,
Genius in both (but what is genius?) playing
Chess on a marble table at an inn
With chestnut blossom falling in blond beer
And on their hair and between knight and bishop—
Sunlight squared between them on the chess-board
Cirrus in heaven, and a squeal of music
Blown from the leathern door of Ste. Sulpice—

Discussing, between moves, iamb and spondee,
Anacoluthon and the open vowel
God the great peacock with his angel peacocks
And his dependent peacocks, the bright stars:
Disputing too of fate as Plato loved it,
Or Sophocles, who hated and admired,
Or Socrates, who loved and was amused:

Verlaine puts down his pawn upon a leaf
And closes his long eyes, which are dishonest,
And says ‘Rimbaud, there is one thing to do:
We must take rhetoric and wring its neck! . . .’
Rimbaud considers gravely, moves his Queen;
And then removes himself to Timbuctoo.

And Verlaine dead,—with all his jades and mauves;
And Rimbaud dead in Marseilles with a vision,
His leg cut off, as once before his heart;
And all reported by a later lackey,
Whose virtue is his tardiness in time.

Let us describe the evening as it is:—
The stars disposed in heaven as they are:
Verlaine and Shakespeare rotting, where they rot,
Rimbaud remembered, and too soon forgot;

Order in all things, logic in the dark;
Arrangement in the atom and the spark;
Time in the heart and sequence in the brain—

Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine.
And let us take godhead by the neck—
And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.”

“Sometimes the words are so close I  am
more who I am when I’m down on paper
than anywhere else as if my life were
practicing for the real me I become
unbuttoned from the anecdotal and
unnecessary and undressed down
to the figure of the poem, lie by line,
the real text a child could understand.
Why do I get confused living it through?
Those of you, lost and yearning to be free,
who hear thee words, take heart from me.
I once was in as many drafts as you.
But briefly, essentially, here I am. . . 
Who touches this poem touches a woman.

"Among Pelagian travelers,
Lost on their lewd conceited way
To Massachusetts, Michigan,
Miami or L.A.,

An airborne instrument I sit,
Predestined nightly to fulfill
Columbia-Giesen-Management’s
Unfathomable will,

By whose election justified,
I bring my gospel of the Muse
To fundamentalists, to nuns,
To Gentiles and to Jews,

And daily, seven days a week,
Before a local sense has jelled,
From talking-site to talking-site
Am jet-or-prop-propelled.

Though warm my welcome everywhere
I shift so frequently, so fast,
I cannot now say where I was 
The evening before last,

Unless some singular event
Should intervene to save the place,
A truly asinine remark,
A soul-bewitching face,

Or blessed encounter, full of joy,
Unscheduled on the Giesen Plan,
With, here, an addict of Tolkien,
There, a Charles Williams fan.

Since Merit but a dunghill is,
I mount the rostrum unafraid:
Indeed, ‘twere damnable to ask
If I am overpaid.

Spirit is willing to repeat
Without a qualm the same old talk,
But Flesh is homesick for our snug
Apartment in New York.

A sulky fifty-six, he finds
A change of mealtime utter hell,
Grown far too crotchety to like
A luxury hotel.

The Bible is a goodly book
I always can peruse with zest,
But really cannot say the same
For Hilton’s Be My Guest.

Nor bear with equanimity
The radio in students’ cars,
Muzak at breakfast, or—dear God!—
Girl-organists in bars.

Then, worst of all the anxious thought,
Each time my plane begins to sink
And the No Smoking sign comes on:
What will there be to drink?

Is this a milieu where I must
How grahamgreeneish!  How infra dig!
Snatch from the bottle in my bag 
An analeptic swig?

Another morning comes: I see,
Dwindling below me on the plane,
The roofs of one more audience
I shall not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although
I don’t remember which was which:
God bless the U.S.A., so large,
So friendly, and so rich."

“Forgive me
for backing over
and smashing
your red wheelbarrow.

It was raining
and the rear wiper 
does not work on
my new plum-colored SUV.

I am also sorry
about the white
chickens.”

I am a nude formalist poet, a sprung
syntax poet, a multitrack poet, a
wondering poet, a social expressionist
poet, a Baroque poet, a constructivist poet,
an ideolectical poet. I am a New York poet in
California, a San Francisco poet on
the Lower East Side, an Objectivist poet
in Royaumont, a surrealist poet in Jersey,
a Dada poet in Harvard Square,
a zaum poet in Brooklyn, a merz poet
in Iowa, a cubo-futurist poet in Central Park.
I am a Buffalo poet in Providence, a London
poet in Cambridge, a Kootenay School
of Writing poet in Montreal, a local poet
in Honolulu.
I am a leftist poet in my armchair
and an existential poet on the street;
an insider poet among my friends,
an outsider poet in midtown.
I am a serial poet, a paratactic poet, a 
disjunctive poet, a discombobulating poet,
montage poet, a collage poet, a hypertextual
poet, a nonlinear poet, an abstract poet,
a nonrepresentational poet, a process poet,
a polydiscourse poet, a conceptual poet.
I am a vernacular poet, a talk poet, a dialect
poet, a heteroglossic poet, a slang poet, a 
demotic poet, a punning poet, a comic poet.
I am an iambic poet I am,
a dactylic poet, a tetrameter poet,
an anapestic poet.
I am a capitalist poet in Leningrad
and a socialist poet in St. Petersburg;
a bourgeois poet at Zabar’s, a union poet
in Albany; an elitist poet on TV,
a political poet on the radio.
I am a fraudulent poet, an incomprehensible poet, a degenerate
poet, an incompetent poet, an indecorous poet, a crude poet
an incoherent poet, a flat-footed poet, a disruptive poet, a
fragmenting poet, a contradictory poet, a self-imploding poet,
a conspiratorial poet, an ungainly poet, an anti-dogmatic poet,
an infantile poet, a theoretical poet, an awkward poet, a sissy
poet, an egghead poet, a perverse poet, a clumsy poet,
a cacophonous poet, a vulgar poet, a warped
poet, a silly poet, a queer poet, an
erratic poet, an erroneous poet, an anarchic poet,
a cerebral poet, an unruly poet,
an emotional poet, a (no) nonsense poet. I am a language
poet wherever people try to limit the modes of
expression or nonexpression.  I am an experimental poet
to those who value craft over interrogation, an
avant-garde poet to those who see the future
in the present. I am a Jewish poet hiding in the shadow
of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother.
I am a difficult poet in Kent, a visual poet in
Cleveland, a sound poet in Cincinnati.
I am a modernist poet to postmodernists and a postmodern poet
to modernists.  I am a book artist in Minneapolis
and a language artist in Del Mar.
I am a lyric poet in Spokane, an analytic
poet in South Bend, a narrative poet
in Yellow Knife, a realist 
poet in Berkeley.
I am an antiabsorptive poet in the morning,
an aborptive poet in the afternoon,
and a sleepy poet at night.
I am a parent poet, a white poet, a man poet, an urban poet, an
angered poet, a sad poet,
an elegiac poet, a raucous poet, a frivolous poet, a detached
poet, a roller-coaster poet, a
volcanic poet, a dark poet, a skeptical poet, an eccentric poet, a
misguided poet, a reflective
poet, a dialectical poet, a polyphonic poet, a hybrid poet, a
wandering poet, an odd poet, a
lost poet, a disobedient poet, a bald poet, a virtual poet.
& I am none of these things,
nothing but the blank wall of my aversions
writ large in disappearing ink—

“you’re better than ever.
you’ve sold out.
you suck.
my mother hates you.
you’re rich.
you’re the best writer in the English language.
can I come see you?
I write just like you do, only better.
why do you drive a BMW?
why don’t you give more readings?
can you still get it up?
do you know Allen Ginsberg?
what do you think of Henry Miller?
will you write a foreword to my next book?
I enclose a photograph of Céline.
I enclose my grandfather’s pocket watch.
the enclosed jacket was knitted by my wife in Bavarian style.
have you been drunk with Mickey Rourke?
I am a young girl 19 years old and I will come and clean your
     house.
you are a stinking bastard to tell people that Shakespeare is not 
     readable.
what do you think of Norman Mailer?
why do you put down Hemingway?
why do you steal from Hemingway?
why do you knock Tolstoy?
I’m doing hard time and when I get out I’m coming to see you
you’ve saved my god-damned life.
why do you hate women?
I love you.
I read your poems at parties.
did all those things really happen to you?
why do you drink?
I saw you at the racetrack but I didn’t bother you.
I’d like to renew our relationship.
do you really stay up all night?
I can out-drink you.
you stole it from Sherwood Anderson.
did you ever meet Ezra?
I am alone and I think of you every night.
who the hell do you think you’re fooling?
my tits aren’t much but I’ve got great legs.
fuck you, man.
my wife hates you.
will you please read the enclosed poems and comment?
I am going to publish all those letters you wrote me.
you jack-off motherfuck, you’re not fooling anybody.”

“Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.”

“It all began fairly early in the day
at the coffee shop as it turned out
when the usual waitress said
I’ll bet you’re going to write a poem about this
after she had knocked a cup of coffee into my lap.

Then later in the morning I was told
by a student that I should write a poem
about the fire drill that was going on
as we all stood on the lawn outside our building.

In the afternoon a woman I barely knew
said you could write a poem about that,
pointing to a dirigible that was passing overhead.

And if all that were not enough,
a friend turned to me as we walked past
a man whose face was covered with tattoos
and said, I see poem coming!

Why is everyone being so helpful?
I wondered that evening by the shore of a lake.

Maybe I should write a poem
about all the people who think
they know what I should be writing poems about.

It was just then in the fading light that I spotted
a pair of ducks emerging
from a cluster of reeds to paddle out to open water,

the female glancing back over her russet shoulder
just in time to see me searching my pockets for a pen.

I knew it, she quacked, with a bit of a brogue.
But who can blame you for following your heart?
she went on.
Now, go write a lovely poem about me and the mister.”

“By the time I get myself out of bed, my wife has left
the house to take her botany final and the painter
has arrived in his van and is already painting
the columns of the front porch white and the decking gray.

It is early June, a breezy and sun-riddled Tuesday
that would quickly be forgotten were it not for my
writing these few things down as I sit here empty-headed
at the typewriter with a cup of coffee, light and sweet.

I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only
responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation
until it’s time to got to lunch with the other girls,
all of us ordering the cottage cheese with half a pear.

This is what stenographers do in courtrooms,
alert at their dark contraptions catching every word. 
When there is a silence they sit still as I do,
waiting and listening, fingers resting lightly on the keys.

This is what Samuel Pepys did too, jotting down in
private ciphers minor events that would have otherwise
slipped into the heavy, amnesiac waters of the Thames.
His vigilance paid off finally when London caught fire

as mine does when the painter comes in for coffee.
and says how much he likes this slow, vocal rendition
of ‘You don’t Know What Love is’ and I figure I will
make him a tape when he goes back to his brushes and pails.

Under the music I can hear the rush of cars and trucks
on the highway and every so often the new kitten, Felix,
hops into my lap and watches my fingers drumming out
a running record of this particular June Tuesday

as it unrolls before my eyes, a long intricate carpet
that I am walking on slowly with my head bowed 
knowing that it is leading me to the quiet shrine
of the afternoon and the melancho9ly candles of evening.

If I look up, I see out the window the white stars
of clematis climbing a ladder of strings, a woodpile,
a stack of faded bricks, a small green garden of herbs,
things you would expect to find outside a window,

all written down now and placed in the setting
of a stanza as unalterably as they are seated
in their chairs in the ontological rooms of the world.
Yes, this is the kind of job I could succeed in,

an unpaid but contented amanuensis whose hands
are two birds fluttering on the lettered keys,
whose eyes see sunlight splashing through the leaves,
and the bright pink asterisks of honeysuckle

and the piano at the other end of this room with
its small vase of faded flowers and its empty bench. 
So convinced am I that I have found my vocation,
tomorrow I will begin my chronicling earlier,

at dawn, a time when hangmen and farmers are up and doing
when men holding pistols stand in a field back to back.
It is the time the ancients imagined in rows, as Eos
or Aurora, who would leave her sleeping husband in bed,

not to take her botany final, but to pull the sun,
her brother, over the horizon’s brilliant rim,
her four-horse chariot aimed at the zenith of the sky.
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,

barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window
in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.
She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,
offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.”

“poetry should hopscotch in a polka dot dress
wheel cartwheels
n hold your hand
when you walk past the yellow crackhouse

poetry should wear bright red lipstick
n practice kisses in the mirror
for all the fine young men with fades
shootin craps around the corner

poetry should dress in fine plum linen suits
n not be so educated that it don’t stop in
every now n then to sit on the porch
and talk about the comins and goins of the world

poetry should ride the bus
in a fat woman’s Safeway bag
between the greens n chicken wings
to be served with tuesday’s dinner

poetry should drop by a sweet potato pie
ask about the grandchildren
n sit through a whole photo album
on an orange plastic covered lazyboy with no place to go

poetry should sing red revolution love songs
that massage your scalp
and bring hope to your blood
when you think you’re too old to fight

yeah
poetry should whisper electric blue magic
all the years of your life
never forgettin to look you in the soul
every once in a while
n smile”

“Swift had pains in his head.
Johnson dying in bed
Tapped the dropsy himself.
Blake saw a flea and an elf.
Tennyson could hear the shriek
Of a bat. Pope was a freak.
Emily Dickinson stayed
Indoors for a decade.
Water inflated the belly
Of Hart Crane and of Shelley.
Coleridge was a dope.
Southwell died on a rope.
Byron had a round white foot.
Smart and Cowper were put
Away. Lawrence was a fidget.
Keats was almost a midget.
Donne, alive in his shroud,
Shakespeare in the coil of a cloud,
Saw death very well as he
Came crab-wise, dark and massy.
I envy not only their talents
And fertile lack of balance
But the appearance of choice
In their sad and fatal voice.”

“I was smart
and a smart-ass.
Truth be told,
you couldn’t tell me much.
foul-mouthed kids
warned me
not to think I was ‘all that’
just because 
I said ask instead of axe
and got great grades
in English.
I didn’t much care
what they thought,
as long as I got to write
book reports
and compositions
and any other homework
that let me 
lose myself in words.
Somehow, I knew writing
could take me places.
Even my teacher
told me so.
Still, there was no
getting around
one unfortunate fact:
writing was 
a lonely business.”

“Were I to name, out of the times gone by,
The poets dearest to me, I should say,
Pulci for spirits, and a fine, free way;
Chaucer for manners, and close, silent eye;
Milton for classic taste, and harp strung high;
Spenser for luxury, and sweet, sylvan play;
Horace for chatting with, from day to day;
Shakespeare for all, but most, society.

But which take with me, could I take but one?
Shakespeare,—as long as I was unoppressed
With the world’s weight, making sad thoughts intenser;
But did I wish, out of the common sun
To lay a wounded heart in leafy rest,
And dream of things far off and healing,—Spencer.”

“i want to have
an affair
with your
poems.

take the haiku you read
on a late night
plane to chicago,

sip bourbon
with that villanelle
in a penthouse
on central park
west.

or considering
your love for this city,

an apartment above
washington
harbor.

sky dimming
like a chandelier
at twilight,

slow kisses
for each word.”

“The old man William Carlos Williams, who had been famous for kindness
And for bringing to our poetry a mannerless speaking,

In the aftermath of a stroke was possessed by guilt
And began to construct for his wife the chronicle

Of his peccadilloes, an unforgivable thing, a mistake
Like all pleas for forgiveness, but he persisted

Blindly, obstinately, each day, as though in the end 
It would relieve her to know the particulars

Of affairs she must have guessed and tacitly permitted
For she encouraged his Sunday drives across the river.

His poems suggest as much; anyone can see it.
The thread, the binding of the voice, is a single hair

Spliced from the different hairs of different lovers,
And it clings to his poems, blond and dark,

Tangled and straight, and runs on beyond the page.
I carry it with me, saying, ‘I have found it so.’

It is a world of human blossoming, after all.
But the old woman, sitting there like rust—

For her, there would be no more poems of stolen
Plums, of round and firm trunks of young trees,

Only the candor of the bedpan and fouled sheets,
When there could no longer have been any hope

That he would recover, when the thing she desired
Was not his health so much as his speechlessness.”

“San Fran, hipster land,
Jazz sounds, wig sounds,
Earthquake sounds, others,
Allen on Chestnut Street,
Giving poetry to squares,
Corso on knees, pleading,
God eyes.
Rexroth, Ferlinghetti,
Swinging, in cellars,
Kerouac at Locke’s,
Writing Neal
On high typewriter,
Neal, booting a choo-choo,
On zigzag tracks.
Now, many cats
Falling in,
New York cats,
Too many cats,
Monterey scene cooler,
San Franers, falling down.
Canneries closing.
Sardines splitting
For Mexico.
Me too.”

“BARDS of Passion and of Mirth
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Have ye souls in heaven too,
Double-lived in regions new?

—Yes, and those of heaven commune
With the spheres of sun and moon;
With the noise of fountains wonderous
And the parle of voices thunderous;
With the whisper of heaven’s trees
And one another, in soft ease
Seated on Elysian lawns
Browsed by none but Dian’s fawns;
Underneath large blue-bells tented,
Where the daisies are rose-scented,
And the rose herself has got
Perfume which on earth is not;
Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a senseless, trancéd thing,
But divine melodious truth;
Philosophic numbers smooth;
Tales and golden histories
Of heaven and its mysteries.

Thus ye live on high, and then
On the earth ye live again;
And the souls ye left behind you
Teach us, here, the way to find you,
Where your other souls are joying,
Never slumber’d, never cloying.
Here, your earth-born souls still speak
To mortals, of their little week;
Of their sorrows and delights;
Of their passions and their spites;
Of their glory and their shame;
What doth strengthen and what maim:—
Thus ye teach us, every day,
Wisdom, though fled far away.

Bards of Passion and of Mirth
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Ye have souls in heaven too,
Double-lived in regions new!”

“When you came and you talked and you read with your
Private zest from the varicose marble
Of the podium, the lovers of literature
Paid you the tribute of their almost total
Inattention, although someone when you spoke of a pig
Did squirm, and it is only fair to report another gig- 

gled. But you didn’t even care. You seemed
Above remarking we were not your friends.
You hung around inside the rimmed
Circles of your heavy glasses and smiled and
So passed a lonely evening. In an hour
Of talking your honesty built you a tower. 

When it was over and you sat down and the chair-
man got up and smiled and congratulated
You and shook your hand, I watched a professor
In neat bow tie and enormous tweeds, who patted
A faint praise of the sufficiently damned,
Drained spittle from his pipe then scrammed.”

“When I was twenty the one true
free spirit I had heard of was Shelley,
Shelley, who wrote tracts advocating
atheism, free love, the emancipation
of women, the abolition of wealth and class,
and poems on the bliss of romantic love,
Shelley, who, I learned later, perhaps
almost too late, remarried Harriet,
then pregnant with their second child,
and a few months later ran off with Mary,
already pregnant herself, bringing
with them Mary’s stepsister Claire,
who very likely also became his lover,

and in this malaise á trois, which Shelley
had imagined would be “a paradise of exiles,”
they lived, along with the spectre or Harriet,
who drowned herself in the Serpentine,
and of Mary’s half sister Fanny,
who killed herself, maybe for unrequited
love of Shelley, and with the spirits
of adored but often neglected
children conceived incidentally
in the pursuit of Eros—Harriet’s
Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley
and consigned to foster parents; Mary’s
Clara, dead at one; her Willmouse,
Shelley’s favorite, dead at three; Elena,
the baby in Naples, almost surely
Shelley’s own, whom he ‘adopted’
and then left behind, dead at one and a half;
Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron,
whom Byron sent off to the convent
at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five—

and in those days, before I knew
any of this, I thought I followed Shelley,
who thought he was following radiant desire.”

[Trans by Miller Williams]

“Ladies and gentlemen
This is our final word
—Our first and final word—
The poets have come down from Olympus.

For the old folks
Poetry was a luxury item
But for us
It’s an absolute necessity
We couldn’t live without poetry.

Unlike our elders
—And I say it with all respect—
We maintain this
A poet is no alchemist
A poet is a man like all men
A bricklayer building his wall:
A maker of windows and doors.

We talk
With everyday words
We don’t believe in cabalistic signs.

And one thing more:
The poet is there
To see to it the tree does not grow crooked.

This is our message.

We denounce the godlike poet
The cockroach poets
The  bookworm poet.

All of these gentlemen
—And I say it with great respect—
Must be arraigned and tried
For building castles in the air
For wasting time and space
By composing sonnets to the moon
For putting words together by chance
Following the latest Paris fashion.
That’s not for us!
A thought is not born in the mouth
It is born in the heart.

We repudiate
The poetry of dark glasses
The poetry of the cape and sword
 The poetry of the plumed hat
We propose instead
The poetry of the naked eye
The poetry of the hairy chest
The poetry of the bare head.

We don’t believe in nymphs or tritons.
Poetry has to be this:
A girl in a wheatfield—
Or it’s absolutely nothing.

Well now, on the political level
They, our immediate forebears, 
Our good immediate ancestors,
Refracted themselves, dispersed themselves
Passing through crystal prisms.
A few came out communists.
I don’t know if they actually were.
Let’s assume they were communists.
All I know is this:
They were not poets of the people
They were nothing but touted bourgeois poets

Let’s face it:
Only one or two
Ever found a place
In the hearts of the people.
Whenever they could
They declared themselves by word and by deed
Against the poetry of purpose
Against the poetry of the present
Against the poetry of the proletariat.

Let’s say they were communists
But the poetry was a disaster
Second-hand surrealism
Third-hand decadence
Old planks washed up by the sea.
Adjective poetry
Nasal and guttural poetry
Arbitrary poetry
Poetry copies from books?
Poetry based on the revolution of words
—But in fact
Poetry must spring from the revolution of ideas—
Poetry of the endless circle
For half a dozen chosen people:
‘Absolute freedom of expression.’

Today we scratch our heads and wonder
Why would they write such stuff
To frighten the petit bourgeois?
What a waste of time!
The petit bourgeois won’t react
unless his stomach is at stake.

After all who’s afraid of poetry!”

And on your left, ladies and gentlemen: poets.

Young poets and makers, solve your anguish, see
the brave unmedalled, who dares to shape his mind,
printed with dignity, to the machines of change.
A procession of poets adds one footbeat to the
implacable metric line: the great and unbetrayed
   after the sunlight and the failing yellow,
   after the lips bitten with passion and
   gentle, after the deaths, below
   dance-floors of celebration   we turn   we turn
these braveries are permanent. These gifts
flare on our lives clarifying, revealed.

We are too young to see our funerals
in pantomime nightly before uneasy beds,
too near beginnings for this hesitation
obliterated in death or carnival.
Deep into time extend the impersonal stairs,
   established barricades will stand,
before they die the brave have set their hand
on rich particular beauty for their heirs.”

He locks his elbow in mine,
I love all—but not him.”

Frost went for long walks,
Eliot played croquet,
Pound took fencing lessons.

There is a snapshot of Yeats
in a garden with a woman
naked to the waist and smiling.

Auden when he was old
counted the sheets of toilet paper
that a visitor used.”

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.”

I must master a lighted box of far or near,

a highway language of shape, squiggle and sign.

As the quarter-hours pass I watch the lady in charge

of the test, and think how patient, how slow, how nice

she is, a kindly priestess indeed, her large,

round face, her vanilla-pudding, baked-apple-and-spice

face in continual smiles as she calls each ‘Dear’

and ‘Honey’ and shows first-timers what to see.

She enjoys her job, how pleasant to be in her care

rather than brute little bureaucrat or saleslady.

I imagine her life as a tender placing of hands

on her children’s hands as they come to grips with the rocks

and scissors of the world. The girl before me stands

in a glow of good feeling. I take my place at the box.

‘And how are you this lovely morning, Dear?

A few little questions first. Your name?—Your age?—

Your profession?’ ‘Poet.’ ‘What?’ She didn’t hear.

‘Poet,’ I say loudly. The blank pink page

of her face is lifted to me. ‘What?’ she says.

‘POET,’ I yell, ‘P-O-E-T.’

A moment’s silence. ‘Poet?’ she asks. ‘Yes.’

Her pencil’s still. She turns away from me

to the waiting crowd, tips back her head like a hen

drinking clotted milk, and her ‘Ha ha hee hee hee’

of hysterical laughter rings through the room. Again

‘Oh, ha ha ha ha ha hee hee.’

People stop chatting. A few titter. It’s clear

I’ve told some marvelous joke they didn’t quite catch.

She resettles her glasses, pulls herself together,

pats her waves. The others listen and watch.

‘And what are we going to call the color of your hair?’

she asks me warily. Perhaps it’s turned white

on the instant, or green is the color poets declare,

or perhaps I’ve merely made her distrust her sight.

‘Up to now it’s always been brown.’ Her pencil trembles,

then with an almost comically obvious show

of reluctance she lets me look in her box of symbols

for normal people who know where they want to go.”

Too much of magic and false graces,
Tasso, below both poets, places;
But his two heroines’ heavenly charms
Have force that critic rage disarms.  

Milton, tho’ more sublime than these,
Does not so much a reader please:
He wrote in strange fantastic flights,
For madmen, angels, hellish sprites.

‘T would be presumption but to name
Myself with bards so dear to fame;
‘Tis death alone that can decree
What place shall be consigned to me.

You, who by wit and beauty shine,
Who charm the world by grace divine:
In your affections, if i find
A place, I’m first of human kind.”