What Can't Be Told

Joseph-Benoît Suvée, portrait of the poet André Chénier (1762–94). Musée des Beaux-Arts de Carcassonne.

Clouds will separate us —

the time to part has come now.

Wild goose flies away . . .

—Matsuo Bashō (1644–94)

Shelley in the plangent sea storm,

Keats at close to midnight, Rome,

Lowell in his New York taxi,

pace the honking of its horn,

Jarrell on that darkling highway

in a Carolina wood,

maybe saw it—thinking, good!

Plath might well have glimpsed it,

woozy from the oven gas,

Chénier on that Paris scaffold,

aloof amid the witless mass.

A little stern, a little earnest, wearing

just the slightest frown,

smitten by its ardent bearing,

none of them could write it down.