“ . . . he lay among his mysteries / and desired only this gold crumb he already had.”—Rilke, “The Alchemist,” trans. C. F. MacIntyre
When you are old and all your friends have died,
--well, most of them, those left, sadly, a silent few--
you fear to judge the merits of your work
--reading it over, so much of it seems crass--
but then Yeats, Auden, Lowell, Larkin too
wrote reams of rubbish, from among the mass
of which such brilliant bits stand out,
gleaming augurs in the wordy trash.
We sapiens are a parlous lot, we prattle
too much--talk embroiders our small battle,
talk, words, language, invented aeons ago
by ancestors half-thug, half-angel, descended from the trees
in that immemorial speechless Eden
that we now strive to remember. Perhaps to know?
9/23/23