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That I glimpsed the wonders
of poetry
in the 1970s
is a miracle. There wasn’t
any poetry. The Nazis
had killed it
and the adolescent me
who found poems
in quaint old ages
found only embers of a fire
long ago burned out.
Only under the most extreme conditions,
filled with wild and hopeless desire—
can something be invented—
or re-invented. Was it just forgot?
No poet can re-discover
poetry;
that was not my fate, that was not
my lot.
Beware—one with no personality
will go mad and have many;
one reserved, bookish,
refined, sensible,
will end up tragically laughing
on a filthy farm.
The leisure to fail, the failure of the daring
practicality of the fanatic,
do all kinds of harm,
and yet harm is always done,
harm finds its person and its place—
you can see it in my innocent face;
in my life
I managed to find the wrong street
address, approach to things,
wife—
but there still remains a place
I go, safe from all extremes.
I listen to old, sad, music,
I hear in my wild dreams
chuckling intelligence; I am
calm in the truths Plato knew,
I survive you and you—and you,
the one I loved; I remain immune
to sad insights under the moon,
I make it ignorantly into middle age,
free from harm, change, age,
avoiding the serial killer’s sick insight that
sex is rage,
and in my middle age I
ignore
every seduction
which sinks
into the mystic.
Do you think I over-
think? You over-think.
Only under the most extreme conditions
will the most crafty science bring me home
to Poe and you and Athens and
Rome,
in my sad day,
Dante, in the
bright red sky,
every trouble and doubt
which I, dreaming, chased away;
here I am, knowing at last,
only under the most extreme conditions,
to be glorious
for them—who will die—
will be to love them,
who love me, burning, in the
burning past.