Incidents of Travel in Poetry

Happy Birthday Kenneth Koch/Feb 27 We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants were waiting for him to unearth the sun in Elissa. The clouds were as cool as a dog’s nose pressed against our cheeks. I notice your eggshell skin is as creamy as a lion’s armpit as we cross the horizon on strands of Yeats’ silver hair. There is a light coffee flame in his eyes guiding us like an old Irish house cleaner holding a candle in a black and white English movie. Yeats’ lips look like an angry Rimbaud illuminating poetry with his youth and vigorous sunlight. He knew eternity would vanish the sun at dusk. He caught it with a rainbow tied to his finger. There was nothing left after that. We cross the equator heading north following Emily Dickinson’s black bag containing stems of her longer poems preserved in darkness and memory like wild pearls thrown overboard to avoid capture by Spanish pirates. The islands below float by like water hearts in a child’s aquarium. We are candy wrappers being blown across the waxed floors of poetry. We land on the Brooklyn Bridge. Whitman’s past-port face is grinning at the nineteenth century in the thorny arms of Gerard Manley Hopkins whose head was set on fire by God’s little hands. The hands that circumcised the world. Gertrude Stein is a match flaring on a young woman’s pillow whose birthmarks have been stolen. We cross the green Atlantic into World War One. We are met by Rilke dressed in his Orpheus uniform wearing white sonnet gloves that once belonged to a stone angel. Rilke offers us a glass of amontillado made from Lorca’s private stock of gypsy tears. The sherry is not quite as dry as Wallace Stevens’ lush mango metaphors of familiar objects. Although Stevens’ poems are fragrant, there is a lingering afterthought of Pound on the tongue. Pound collected his misty feelings to make raindrops into European and American poetry. Vagueness became as sharp as a pencil. Our blue box is not allowed to attend Apollinaire’s birthday party held by the august Académie française