Wallace

I

Out of a fecund furrow young Wallace crept
and bided his time: from that generative hollow
slowly he fared. To clang and clamor of gongs?
Were zoos loud with the cries of brutes? Did amens
of organs hullabaloo in candled aisles
of churches? trinkets tinkle in Katmandu
to token that most grand arrival? Perhaps
some insignificant stars went nova, bursts
that flung effulgence over measureless voids?
More likely plums in unattended gardens
fell earthward unregarded, roses reddened in
silence as they always had, and things occurred
as they had always occurred when through the labial
curtain Wallace wetly swam and blindly cried.

And he was prince of patience, and practical
beyond the comprehension of his kind
who lick the boots of time and fervidly kiss
the arse of death: four decades and three tenths
of a further he passed in preparation, provisioned
by cool uncowardly conscience, in ambition
sane and certain, temperate. Now how few
who thrive on flittings of the tongue, who wonder
at baubles of sound that furnish silence, may claim
as sober a sense of endeavor? As calm a dream?


II

No sloth was he, nor sluggard: clock hands ticked
for order; thus his heart sent civil blood
to civil veins. Verse is no accidental
aggregation of sign and syllable
sent from some mythic muse, nor incidental
aside breathed past the back of the hand
to elite neurotics in the know. Who works
in poetry is no effusive oracle
nor histrionic medium who hums.

Who makes a chair or table is at task
no less a saint or savior: in a sense
the world is better for its sawing men.
Lawyers
have shown palaver lords it over sense
by demonstrating how it is that wrong
is right and right is wrong; and to assist,
the poets propagate mendacities.

Not Wallace, the man of business. Poet too,
he spoke of Sundays simplified by sense,
of perfect pleasures in the present tense:
What lies beyond the clutter of light and cloud
is merely stuffless aether; your suffering
will glut no angel to satiety;
Nor will your pious hunger or languor keep
Infatuate eyes of cosmic gods upon you;
nor will self-immolation, self-subjugation,
all means of the surrender of the self,
the mingling of the soul in the Greater All,
secure your place in the massive hollows of Heaven.

Rise and unwind the webs of shiftlessness,
the dross of dreams that, like uncomely dust,
has settled on you. Rather, be patinated
by sheen of satisfaction, being source
and center of all that moves you, (nor determined
by any invisible force) emboldened by volition.



late 90's (inspired by Ayn Rand; imitating Stevens. I now have a different worldview and do not endorse the one I had here.)