Country Music: Selected Early Poems

Portrait of the Poet in Abraham von Werdt's Dream

Portrait of the Poet in Abraham von Werdt's Dream Outside, the Venice skyline, and stars Half-seen through an opened window; Inside, it's the Renaissance, The men in hose, The furnishings elegant, but spare; A griffin rears in the archway; An eagle dives from the ceiling; And over the far wall—like Diirer's— Two cherubs support the three Disordered initials of my signature. Paper is stacked in neat piles, as I First drew them; square blocks of type, their beds Tilted and raised, their letters reversed, Glisten among the shadows; Two men in the foreground work A press, inking and setting; a third Is washing his hands, kneeling In front of a tub; a fourth, his right arm Extended, adjusts the unused type; A fifth is correcting proof. Alone in an alcove, a sixth man, unnoticed And unfamiliar, his strange clothes Centuries out of date, is writing, his back turned To what I tried to record. The lines, a spidery darkness, move Across the page. Now He looks this way. And now he rises —XYZ, his mouth says, XYZ—, Thrusting the paper into my hands. These words are the words he has written. 18 ...