The poetry which is loud and embarrassing turns into religion.
But it is not less poetry for this. Be loud and embarrassing!
The stutterer who stutters his poem in the shadows
goes backwards into poetry. The shy listener of the sermon,
preparing, in her heart, the road to her heart,
is poetry enough for me.
There are some issues where the only view to take is no view
and taking no view, one should be fanatical in doing so.
Be two-faced, be proud to be two-faced, be secretive
and play both sides. Some issues demand this. They do.
They will destroy you, otherwise. I will know you by
the non-view of your saintly lie.
The real universe is infinite
but literature’s farthest walls are known,
Homer and stabbing,
Greek drama’s primitive delight,
the misty, mathematical metropolis
of Aristotle and Plato. A small path leading
from that vista, plagued with statuary,
finds the Christ—literature to be taken personally;
one classmate did, cleaner and quieter than you,
less impatient, far less books to read and girls to woo;
nearer walls, seen almost with the naked eye,
but covered by clouds, the Renaissance and its virgin shadows
and by the time you smell the bookstore’s ardor,
Voltaire, the sarcasm of colonial fiat, the irony a little too sincere,
slavery giving way to electricity; before you know it,
Hitchcock, who knew his Poe, noir and horror, the return to the Greeks,
mirrors smashed with Psychology: the killer in Psycho a mommy’s boy,
the intellectual who won’t grow up; is gay, secretly,
or not gay, secretly; bonds with female voters
against rancorous heterosexual jealousy—
which tragically cares too much
the fate of who is in the womb.
This poem’s almost done. All I need to do is wrap things up
by mentioning Goethe, or not mentioning Goethe.
Imprisoned by the rhetoric of the scholar! O for a branch of Keats,
growing in the deep forest green.
Asia minor, the symphony in C minor, the uneducated (that’s me),
will be left out. Even my own poem,
all of them, their worth always in doubt;
my flesh will be sacrificed, I guess,
to be here for a little while, like you!
To be neutral, truly neutral, in the first nervous greeting:
“Hey, what’s new?”