And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

Not Even Solomon . . .

93 Not Even Solomon . . . Whatever you can buy’s not valuable enough, regardless of the cost. What can’t be bought’s invaluable. Not just the white freedom of a rose, sparrows in their soaring circuses, that girl from Amsterdam so tanly tall in Montfleury, harbors at noon with clouds above them pillowing like snow and absolutely still. I’m talking love. I’m talking love and poetry and everything that’s true of each and interchangeably of both. Randomly free, they leave us grateful to no giver we can name. They prove what cannot last can last forever even when we say it’s lost . . . Some losers ache like Aengus or like Leila’s madman, pining for a time so briefly given and so quickly gone. Bereft, they raise their anguish into songs that give a tongue to wounds that never heal. In every song they imitate those troubadours whose poems have outlived their lives. 94 Forget how far they went in school, their ages, or their kin. Whatever wanted to be said and wanted only them to say it made them what they are. It turned them into words that we can share like bread and turn into ourselves. They asked, as I am asking now, for some less unforgiving way to say it, and there isn’t. Or if what happened once might be repeated, and it can’t. Or if another’s poets words would say it better, and they don’t. Of if this cup could pass and spare them poetry and all its contradictions, and it won’t. ...