For Tom
Sestinas make the finest stories, so says the dramaturge
who may as well be Wordsworth
or Scheherazade for all it matters
when we hear that blizzard burying our houses.
He swears we'll wake one morning
to our knitting clubs dissolved
subsumed by a new Prometheus
with a voice like the South Wales coast
who'll speak of our predicament
to make it matter to anyone but poets.
Outside, the blizzard of scriveners
buries all our verses
but we can almost hear that voice above it
the howl of time's inferno
seething the immortal
but the cry is too familiar
that seems come from the center,
this raging out of nowhere,
it's for attention, nothing more
and would take your voice if you let it.
The quest for immortality never ends
and there's no black swan in the white snowfall
this morning, just gusts of snowdrift grit
to powder windows over
like furnace ash from hellfire smoke
on whorls of desert dunes
and statuary statuesque with boughs of hanging marble.
There's no great voice inside these swirls
just nature's inescapable poem
that makes where I sit the center of its roiling.
