Five Poems about Poetry

1 THE GESTURE The question is: how does one hold an apple Who likes apples And how does one handle Filth? The question is How does one hold something In the mind which he intends To grasp and how does the salesman Hold a bauble he intends To sell? The question is When will there not be a hundred Poets who mistake that gesture For a style. 2 THE LITTLE HOLE The little hole in the eye Williams called it, the little hole Has exposed us naked To the world And will not close. Blankly the world Looks in And we compose Colors And the sense Of home And there are those In it so violent And so alone They cannot rest. 3 THAT LAND Sing like a bird at the open Sky, but no bird Is a man— Like the grip Of the Roman hand On his shoulder, the certainties Of place And of time Held him, I think With the pain and the casual horror Of the iron and may have left No hope of doubt Whereas we have won doubt From the iron itself And hope in death. So that If a man lived forever he would outlive Hope. I imagine open sky Over Gethsemane, Surely it was this sky. 4 PAROUSIA Impossible to doubt the world: it can be seen And because it is irrevocable It cannot be understood, and I believe that fact is lethal And man may find his catastrophe, His Millennium of obsession. air moving, a stone on a stone, something balanced momentarily, in time might the lion Lie down in the forest, less fierce And solitary Than the world, the walls Of whose future may stand forever. 5 FROM VIRGIL I, says the buzzard, I— Mind Has evolved Too long If ‘life is a search For advantage.’ ‘At whose behest Does the mind think?’ Art Also is not good For us Unless like the fool Persisting In his folly It may rescue us As only the true Might rescue us, gathered In the smallest corners Of man’s triumph. Parve puer . . . ‘Begin, O small boy, To be born; On whom his parents have not smiled No god thinks worthy of his table, No goddess of her bed’