Is how deadly a passion for poems and what they mean
Can be, for mere poesy can only offer up
What the storyline will allow,
What takes the young ones out of the darkness
Through whatever guile or treachery
Is available — The poem itself is but a vehicle
That can be what it is on its own time,
When silence is the compensating gift.
The scholars wrap the poems inside their envelopes
That no students risk their moistened lips to seal.
The poets are superstitious. They think to touch
The stream as it glistens would change the course
Of rivers or make the sun slant to the east.
They could be shown as fools in keeping quiet for so long.
But those who would won't touch the stream
Because it's wet and goes a thousand directions
Right through one's fingers. And so there's nothing, really,
To say on what it is, and why it moves
To give anyone room to make improvements.
The scholars wrap the poems inside their envelopes
That students have no moisture left to seal.
It stands imperfectly eternal now, perpetually unwatched.
The thought of its gurgle is enough
To haunt the lips of wayward children
Through the silence they need, like seeds, to grow in.
Maybe, as the decades peel away, they'll discover
Smudge-marred lines and not remember what they meant,
What they never knew, but know somehow, now
They missed, in the days that have slipped through, gone,
So a grief matches up — oblique — with that of the poem.
