Keats' MFA

Old Poems

I read a book of poems

That I wrote four years ago

About what I was thinking at the time.

And it did me in.

It broke the egg. The yolk was runny.

I slept and I recovered.

Now a trap door spider seals me off.

2-1-14

Very Old Poems

God

This is the room

Where god once was

And the throne where he did

What any god does.

Here is his scepter.

Here is his bed.

This is the Bible

He nearly read.

In that iron furnace

Inventing a flame

Is a body of people

Without any name.

1964

Death

It comes in the day

When any can see

And yet til it's here

It is all but ignored.

Whatever that was

No longer shall be

Nor ever restored.

1964

Poetry

Loosening the halter,

The stallion takes his head,

To a mighty precipice

He gallops as if led.

A poem takes a moment

Of writing, then it's done.

If good it stands like marble

Forever in the sun.

A walk around the statue

Carved so carefully,

It seems to me to speak.

It's still, like poetry.

A poem is not mute,

A live thing on a pin

On a board of cork.

It will start again.

When the box is broken

The Monarchs venture free,

In fragile awkward flight.

A rainbow poetry.

 

Epiphanies

I saw in San Francisco

A couple little sparrows

Sitting on a bench together

Just inside the park.

“That,” I thought, “is what I want,

To be another sparrow.”

Later on in Hackensack

Passing by a store

Through an open door I looked

And saw a couple people,

Maybe three inside,

Deep in the recesses of the room

Sitting, talking.

“That is what I want,”

I thought. And in a month

I was insane.

I know people. Some of them

Can make me funny. Many people

Can be funny. I am one.

Yet from 50 years ago,

I am not a sparrow.

I do not sit and talk.

Sadly wishful fantasies

Do not foretell the future.

1-9-14

Keats' MFA

The magic phrases Keats was out to score -

Two white swans majestic stately oar

Themselves across the water. I forgot the quote.

Instead of swans, it could have been a boat.

Assiduous he got an MFA.

By reading poems. That's the proper way.

And so found the way great poets wrote.

The key to art is though its poetry.

And the way to learn to write it

Is to see how it was written.

Faced with an acute tenacity,

Keats did not learn laws but poesy.

The Approach

Google, Kindle, Amazon

Tell you how to sell your books,

But I don't want to flaunt myself.

I'd rather be discovered

Like the poets I revere.

Back several hundred years.

 

Love

Love's a word used just too very much.

Now it is a brand of women's clothes.

It is a thing all animals can touch.

What is it? From birth the baby knows.