April

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Spring”

For one purpose, April, do you return again.
Prose is not enough.
It can no longer quiet me with the flatness
Of countless pages turning steadily.
I write what I write.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The rhythms emerging.
The sound of the wind is rhymed.
It is apparent that all is life.
But what does that signify?
Not only in the heavens are the minds of men
Inspired by muses.
Desire in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a sheet of unmarked paper.
It is enough that yearly, down this hill,
I
Come like an idiot, babbling and strewing poems.

A Poem of Poems

(with apologies to pretty much everyone)

O, where are the snows of yesteryear,
     Alone and palely loitering?
Once upon a midnight drear,
     They changed their state with kings.

I caught this morning morning's minion,
     She walks in beauty like the night.
And everything happens that can't be done,
     To rage against the light.

I am the music maker,
     And captain of my soul.
I take the road less traveled by:
     The grave is not it’s goal.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
     And Hope is the thing with feathers.
Death I think is no parenthesis,
     But I go on forever.

I wandered lonely as a cloud,
     And went to Innisfree,
My head is bloody but unbowed,
     Death kindly stopped for me.

* * * (additional verse that didn’t quite seem to fit) * * *

Today we have naming of parts,
     But I know not which to prefer.
O, never say that I was false of heart,
     By the shining Big-Sea-Water.