At the AWP


Into the room come nervous female poets who ask on both sides
whether the seat is taken,
come old men–you know them–so used to being handsome
that they do not know how to give it up,
the gray hair hyacinthine, the lashes long.
They are never beside one of the vacant chairs,
never one of those the edgy poetesses ask permission of.

The room is full of the memory of poems.
They can be drawn out of the skull as witness for any side,
or all sides in one moment, like a cliff of explanatory birds.
The room is full of incomplete conversions.
The room is, certainly, full of poets, each
listening for the word that opens-- once, or yet again–
the door to the world they have inhabited all the while.

One is made insensate by so many shafts sunk
beneath the vein, sucking up darkness in the dark night,
so many delvings down and in when the field is a white field
for its flowers, the gold souls dipping and humming.
The room is full of the sadness of the right word come to late.
The angels stand upon the deep places. They alone
are certain when to laugh out loud.
.
And will say for myself only that I have been pure--
pure of intention of any discernible kind, salt-pure,
one white stone in the mountain river pure,
free of whatever flotilla of annotation guards the
single swift ship one should have chosen for one’s own.
I have opened my red beak and sung my single song.
The One, the two I meant to please, are pleased.