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The ones I read have done for me
far more than I could do for myself.
Yet only I know all that’s in front of me,
all that I am; nothing in my poetry
proves them superior to me—
but if it does, it only proves they did nothing;
ignorant, they lay there, while I fed on them:
Homer, Horace, God, John Milton.
I felt I was falling asleep in their works
and their dreams converted my mind
to one able to feel their breezes
and wander in their streams, every tree
of theirs I studied, producing leaves for me.
And I gain from their minds, poetry,
that is now, in point of fact, my mind,
so their very verses are my landscape,
my personality, instantaneously
leading you to think
I am what I know, I am what I drink,
these walls the bones of poets dead
by this poem built and illustrated,
dipped in eyestrain that was theirs,
capturing their sacrifice and cares,
kindly and with gestures new
that are them and fool you.
