What Poetry Can Do

 

Poetry
tugs me by the hand into the room with all the maps 
the muses on the double stair, the dragon 
spilling out in undulating constellation overhead 

and there—the blue to end all blues, clairvoyant, 
on that little bit of wall I might so easily have missed 
now that they keep the light deliberately dim. 

It builds a fragile paper kite of balsam wood 
on which to knot my shirttails and myself, and fly 
above it all, oh wobbly Icarus, giving myself 
into the breezy, flighty keeping of the February wind. 

And more substantial architectures too— 

the old stone cloister with the winter oranges and 
the unicorn, above the river, following the slow
progression up Manhattan through Harlem by bus. 

And in another time, the low adobe rooms on
Canyon Road that were once science labs, where
in a sunny window children I no longer recognize,
long grown and gone, are shaping red clay heads

reading The Zoo Story, exploring new fantastic
algebraic rhythms, smoky, foreign in the blood

as Tunisia or some one of those other countries in
North Africa where they have those brilliant blue tiles
and spices heaped in little bowls, one of those sultry
countries in the foreign films. 

And in the ghost-light of the projector
it summons ghosts— 

outside the windows of those other science labs 
south of Los Alamos, built on ancient burial grounds 

and Japanese too—unanticipated revenants.
Samurai faces cicatrixed with characters;
the gardener I tailed after for his measured spirit

raking last year’s leaves on the school path 
under a fall of paper-white petals more transient 
than spring snow, before a careless breath 
melted them utterly away. 

And when I stop to find the words to say how much 
I’ve missed him all these years, and
his deep tractor scoop that bore us up into the sea-light
of the apple trees, that man of common poetry,

who I glimpse just ahead of me again 
slipping unnoticed down the muddy rutted drive 
into the canyon’s plum-bruised heart, that place I loved 

once and forever, beyond words,

here comes running 

through all that brittle yellow rabbitbrush 
which the new tenants haven’t taken time to clear
one of the dogs from Billy Collins’s poems,

its cold, insistent nose 
urging me up the silent rise, back up 
into the traffic of the wayward, chatty road.

 

 

 

image:  fresco from Pompeii, commonly said to be Sappho

(just fyi, see this)