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I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening–any evening–would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.
Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker's nose;
Waterfalls don't remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I've never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone–
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops' brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.
Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d'estaminet.
I'm like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things…peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.
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Although I write often and pass among
Poets, perhaps they do not know I'm young.
I'm nineteen (my birthday will be in June).
If we were both to contemplate the moon,
I'd be unlikely to see anything more
Than craters which we could have seen before
We looked afar through ornate telescopes.
I'll take a place alongside other dopes.
Lambs look like lambs to me. They have no higher
Meaning. The sun: a mere warm orb, like fire.
And dawn: colored stripes, clouded over or hazy.
Perhaps my imagination's lazy.
I don't know whether I'd like to see
Whatever came to others, learnedly.
Whether you believe Christ was really God or doubt him
Not all glum writing's really about him.
Heavenward glances don't ever represent
God's call to an antagonist ("Repent!")
Wardrobes never were Narnian gates,
Few weaving women arcane female Fates.
To unpack an old writer's reference
Or allusion's not my real preference.
I'm baffled, didn't get stuff, have conceded
All I narrate's chaff, not needed.
Leaves which float down rivers have never been
Viking vessels. No one has shown me when
A wolf was a devil. And I don't speak
French, so my poetic street cred's weak.
So though it could spark modernist complaints
I think that I will stick with old constraints.
Limericks, sonnets, other things with iambs,
Acrostics, forms I've made up, anagrams.
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