Poetry Love
It must be wonderful
to be so obsessed with poetry
that you live it, breathe it, consider
every moment without it
a moment wasted
want to do nothing else
but write it, read it, recite it
to your friends and lovers
it must be wonderful
to have only this one mission
for your life, this singular sense
of purpose and pursuit, or perhaps
it is terrible, as a friend
once suggested to me
over lunch in Cambridge,
to be eating nothing but ice cream
all the time, perhaps it is awful
to live on so restricted a diet
even of beauty and pleasure
even of language outgrowing itself
I think I must side with those
who think it terrible
on this beautiful morning
in West Virginia, with the purple vetch
and the spring beauties and the larkspur
and the bluebells and the wild blue phlox
blossoming so perfectly, it must
be horrible to want to go perpetually
turning everything into poetry
to not simply allow the sacred
to be sacred, the profane
profane oh one can get so fat
from too much ice cream, the arteries
clogging, the waistline expanding
the breath coming shorter and shorter
until you die of it all and are left
wishing you’d mastered, also,
the art of prose.