Lawless in Our Own Way

The lyrical poems of print

In their aedicular frames

Of arranged, formatted space,

Like pinned, mounted specimens,

Like portraits by de Lyon,

How we draft words envy them!

To be arranged for the gaze,

To pose on handsome bookshelves,

To be held by thoughtful hands—

Don’t think the rhythmic patterns,

The strictures of prosodies,

Or the fires of confessions

Render poetry formal

Or not. It’s presentation.

A five-word Sapphic fragment,

Like a broken, paint-stripped bust

Of a goddess in scratched rock,

Athena’s grey eyes left blank,

Can look handsomely formal

On paper’s snowy marble,

And Dickinson’s dashed-off notes

To Susan, bound, acid-free,

Can appear monumental.

Walt Whitman, printer’s devil,

Knew just what he was doing

When he typeset Leaves of Grass.

But poems left as holographs

Or, worse and worth less, as bits

Flitting through cloudy ether,

Could unscroll as smooth as Pope’s,

Enfold themselves as densely

As Du Fu, but still feel loose—

Endangered and doomed as wild

Creatures calling through forests

While miners are surveying

For the signatures of ores.