Him Alone

Him Alone

Possibly he's sad.

His regular companion

(They came to Denny's often

Together) has been gone.

Clearly he is crazy.

His jerky mannered movements,

Rigid and abrupt

Give his soul away.

The woman who came with him

Is black. They're very quiet.

I usually wondered

Why she wanted him.

His clothing bespeaks money,

So perhaps he has a job.

Perfect and polite,

Some madmen are not foolish.

But no one but a shrink,

If you trust them so completely,

Could tell you what reality

Lies behind his face.

Shakespeare

A play by William Shakespeare

Is an opera in words.

And every touching, memorable

Passage that goes deep,

That all the world can quote

Is like an aria by god.

2-15-14

Shakespeare

Elizabethan diction and complex.

And words. Too many words I do not know

All skewed to beauty, rapt in their completion.

Though I'm not Shakespeare, I can see his truth.

Shakespeare! Who I heard inclined to doubt

He was as good as Marlowe. He was better.

Does every poet, every poetaster

Compare himself to Shakespeare with regret?
First Shakespeare in verbose complexity -

Then on a pond and floating into sight

A passage of rare beauty to remember,

To read and love, understand and cherish.

Shakespeare

Shakespeare understood the world

For centuries to come.

He summoned up its essence

Like a soldier with a drum.

Since the worm of first humanity

Crawled naked on the shore

And left behind the ocean
(Did something go before?),

The feelings and the fantasies,

The angers and the hopes

Became a human being,

One who forages and gropes

Through primeval darkness,

Til he's vanquished to a tomb

Where he lies forever.

And to all that breathe, this doom.

 

An Annoyance

Exactly like a fly or a mosquito

That buzzes round your face

Or whines inside your ear,

But otherwise completely unimportant -

Swatted with a paper.

I have wasted

67 years. I am a fly,

Only an annoyance, but at times

Maddening, that will not go away.

While they're getting rid of tired loves,

Preparing for the next, I'll be alone,

Writing poems no one wants to read.

The expected climax to this poem

Is that in my solitude I'm writing

Songs that please the world til it is gone,

Fielding lies, disposing of my money,

Listening to Sumi Jo and Cziffra,

Music none I know would like to hear -

Gradually becoming more alone.

 

Like Freud's Unconscious

Like Freud's Unconscious, Junkets' “Welcome Sorrow”
Is a poem of antipodes,

Opposites together co-exist.

But they're unconscious. What is that to me?
Falling trees and wonderful

The surface of the sea

That lifts in waves that hit the shore

And boil across the lea

Watering the flowers,

Cheering children as it passes.

And drown the Yankee battle cry

And game, “The land is free!”

 

A Feeling This Morning

Like Keats, today I feel it

And believe it. I

Shall be among the English

Poets when I die.

As for the American,

When I'm put away

Will there be some poets

But Millay?

And would there be a Keats

Without poetic diction

And a huge vocabulary

Putting forth his fiction?

Who but Johnny Keats

Had such magic in his heart?

He did not write like Shakespeare.

The are 40 leagues apart.

Poems can be beautiful.

It only takes a touch

To speak with expression

When you are not saying much.

Good Poems

All my other books are more exciting

Than the one I now consider best.
And what I think is verse like “Isabella”,

“Lamia” “St. Agnes” and The Odes -

That make him famous – or so I suppose -

Are just clumsy stories badly told.

But the chaff he meant to throw away -

“La Belle”, the sonnets and “This living hand”

Shine like fires on the battlements,

Magic from the cave of an old wizard

That I can visit often. They are truly

The beauty at the outset Keats predicted.

Poems like a butterfly on cork

Famous for their beauty are a bore.

Poems from the conscience or the heart

In imagination are not marble,

Thrill, delight and call me back again.

I am not like Keats, though I would be.

Junkets was archaic even then.

Ideas are like little bolts of feeling

That burst when are read like fireworks

At midnight in a summer in July.

So I think of Keats and keep on reading.

Can I not be beautiful like Keats?
Little poems, lyrics said with charm

And magic? Where's the poet with such charm?

In each millennium one may be born.

I've no charm. I'm just a moth defying

Yet another dictum – don't write poems

On poetry. And never write in rhyme.