Poets use all kinds of tricks
To make you think
You are in the poet’s living room
Or where they work. Start with ink—
Shakespeare’s “unless this miracle have might
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.”
Black ink is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets:
A joke on black ink’s melancholy.
The joke was too flimsy, obviously.
Biographers (fools!) were completely misled.
Poetry is biography stained with ink. It’s dead.
No one will be particularly kind
Knowing they are cut off from everything.
If you travel too far from the poem
You’ll end up very quickly in a place
With human qualities no one believes.
A living room. A hand. Work. A face.