Let us pretend we are poets.
In his mind, Joseph Obvious talks to them all:
Harvard poets, Cummings, Eliot, Wallace Stevens,
whispering to William James in Emerson Hall,
whiskered William James, who tutored Gertrude Stein,
whose poetry sounds like Stevens
(both were published in “Poetry” in 1939).
Thousands of poets Obvious calls on,
rescuing them from oblivion,
as all good readers do.
Sara’s not fond of poetry; she flirts with the dean, her boss.
Poetry wins and therefore Obvious wins
even as he contemplates this loss—
Sara Subtlety in the arms of someone else,
as all the poets stand helplessly on the shelf.
“Let us pretend we are poets,” he had said to her one evening,
but the very moment he spoke,
he stopped, not sure—knowing she wasn’t sure—
whether or not he had made a joke.
He would read those long dead poets all day.
What did they think of Sara? He will see her in ten minutes!
They never say.