The Poem

Not the sunset poem you make when you think aloud,
with its linden tree in India ink
and the telegraph wires across its pink cloud;

not the mirror in you and her delicate bare
shoulder still glimmering there;
not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme--
the tiny music that tells the time;

and not the pennies and weights on those
evening papers piled up in the rain;
not the cacodemons of carnal pain,
not the things you can say so much better in plain prose --

but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown
-- when you wait for the splash of the stone
deep below, and grope for your pen,
and then comes the shiver, and then --

in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,
the leaf-like insects, the eye-spotted birds
fuse and form a silent, intense,
mimetic pattern of perfect sense.