A Translator to His Author

One of the things I've really enjoyed, Ungà, Or felt at home with, is how you never felt At home, regardless of where you went. This modern history of ours, a transparent Globe, has been shaken to make us fall Like snow in the unquaint global village. Our fate is chance, a respite the lyric: A heating up of circumstance to distill A shining crystal from the source. Whether that's really essence, you seemed to doubt And I believe, but I can't prove it of course. It could be just a constellated mood The poet sets in language the way The Greek gods hoisted the heroes - Hercules, Orion, what have you - plucking them From dénouement and hanging them in the sky As emblems of light. I've been a chaser Of lyric moments longer than is seemly For any uomo di pena, after two failed marriages And two degrees (all four were two-year programs). Every lover knows the Muse hates directness. Which brings me back to the star metaphor. One of my homeland's most lyrical, Recent poets said poems are basically accidents That happen to the peripherally inclined. Too head-on a glance would blanch the twinkle In detergents of a madness to possess. That was always your specialty, a kind Of cosmic fiber optics, and I admit That poetry will always be that for me, First and most of all but no longer only. For one thing, there is always the danger Of lapsing into a search for fragments Of a broken mirror, rather than the smashed sky Of quantitative science. We find one On the ground and check our hair and face. I've thought at times we've shared a living space, But who has been the guest of whom? Did you Invite me to set up shop with the ratchets And gauges of your exquisite, fussy art? Or did I barge in, take the made for given, And remake it in my image, usurping A slurp of muscatel it is your right To savor now, hermetic? I've tried To come up with a few connections, As we're inclined to do to place our acts: You being in the same war, perhaps The same battlefield, as my grandfather, Whose hands I have, was in; the fact that you Were Aquarian, like me, prone to being Detached, aloof, pooh-poohing the sublunar, Darling of the god who always eats his kin, Within the sphere where clumsy flaws Are lessons in another kind of perfection; And lastly, your lifelong search for a paternity Of poetry: things whose mystery is mysterious. But that in your search I found a father For another birth, or gesture at least of life Outside the given, all my second fathers vaunt As reaching where we've always sort of been, The native land of what we really want.