Once I wrote for history, prose-chronicling
Exploits of statesmen & politicos
In their hours of selfless courage,
Things I strove to emulate
Before poetic insight overcame me
During the down & out years, too-full
Of a tragedian’s dull accounting.
No one knew of my slow conversion
To poetry, not even Robert Frost’s ghost
(during hours when time froze itself
Within the gravity of great decisions
& their imponderable consequences,
I doodled words on scratch paper
To momentarily escape into abstract intervals:)
Was it a lilting lyric lost in a Roman wind
Or some snatch of song calling to me
Across the long lineage of histories,
Farther even than our family one?
Let my discarded poems play beneath
A desk for the custodian; let
The workaday business too engage
Airs of this freight office, for no one
Will know of this aesthetic license
Having its way through mind & body
Where I am one with something
Beyond the grasp of ordinary vision,
Where words dance like children now
I raise their fallen hearts from.