How will you travel over it? By train? By stage?
Perhaps you'll choose a huge hot-air balloon?
How will you fit the dashes on the page
That describes your first liaison with a canyon?
Don't look so bewildered. I've read your poem.
I know you claim that these things needn't be seen.
But this absurd superfluity of room
Is precisely what it means to be American
And not a square inch in it for a poem.
That's why I need you for a chaperon .
For me, you see, before I came out West
You
were what it meant to be American
And I didn't know if I was cursed or blessed -
To sit up in a garret on your own,
All that stunning marksmanship unnoticed.
But I had you. You'd written what you'd written.
I wanted to live in that same country.
I liked to think that we had things in common
And it didn't seem so long to wait - a century -
To have one's book on every library's shelf
In
my own way, I'm just as greedy as Dante,
Trying to have you here all to myself
Dante at least was worthy of his guest
While I am stuck with this colossal gulf -
Not just this vast expanse to East from West
But my wordiness, my clumsiness, my
life.
Virgil came to Dante as a ghost
But I wanted to bring you here
alive
And you such a shy woman and I so brazen,
With nothing to give you. I don't even drive,
Barely know the West. I'm its newest citizen.
Besides, you're right. A poet needn't see.
IfI
actually thought I'd made you listen
