Archive
06/12/09 - (3)
Gift
It had everything to do with illusion, trickery, fantasy (Imagination's chief allies, coevals), A latent creativity which possessed you,
One mid-March night's dream, back in '63, Just prior to your graduation from Elihu Yale's university, When, in two ephemeral spasms of ecstasy,
You scribbled your first, amateurish poems — Probes on the dark side of epiphany's burgeoning moon, Searching for what, then, you couldn't have had a clue,
Just an inchoate intuition of a misty future, A vague possibility of illuminating your life, By sticking with a furious regimen of penning poems,
Despite the reality that existence offers little recompense To those who express literary mea culpas For the trivialities of their earthly trespasses.
But in all fairness, honesty, humility, How could you, a mere intellectual neophyte, Have expected those seismic verse-eruptions
To have shaken the earth, Toppled the ivory towers of New Haven and beyond, When you were all of twenty-two
And impossibly incapable of deciphering your psyche, Deciding, in that primal, formative time of times, That you were meant to be a bard,
An inventor of imagistic paper clips, metaphorical mousetraps, A creator of wondrous worlds waiting to be — Worlds whirling within words?
To be true to truth, you couldn't, Not then, anyway, In those callow days of your stoic, unsown oats,
When your inchoate, untested artistic instincts Had yet to unfurl their wings And your vocal cords had yet to sing your oeuvre alive.
Tonight, after half a century minus four years Of composing verse that still mesmerizes your soul, You marvel at your passion's burn, its staying power,
Exclaim your deep gratitude, at this late hour, For having been bequeathed this privilege, this gift, Of translating yourself into breathing life-lines.
06/12/09 - (3)
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