Jared Smith
ENTERING THE ROOM OF THE LATE POET
This table is a borrowing
of a dead universe once crowded with dimensions
which swam through until given names.
It is the burial ground of bones of love
packed so close that they became one.
And the fingers that wove the almost-nonexistent boundaries
are now the same creations of another mind.
The work is not lost except as a catbird beneath a bush;
the breath shatters in a morning rain.
They say, wherever they speak of the man,
the cold slab leading to his door was never washed;
but so many passed that way it had no dust of differentiation.
Dogs howled in the garden of his spring when the lake was dry–
maybe sensing when the mouth is still all words are spoken
in the case of a man who likes to speak.
And they say the last manuscripts written there–
the pile of papers by the matchburn in the wood-
will kill the man who prints them; will save the man who reads.
But stories and heroes have a way of being much too big–
there is no dimension for them in the tables of our time,
and that is where we live. Maybe once ...
but this is a borrowing.
