Whatever It Is, It Avails Not

You catch Tagore and Whitman

Trying to converse with you

Across the many decades,

Willing their words to bridge death—

Who are you reader, reading

My poems an hundred years hence?

What is the count of the scores

Or hundreds of years between?

Tagore wants you to conjure

The scent of his dead flowers.

Whitman wants to bond with you

And tell you about Brooklyn.

You can’t smell Tagore’s flowers,

Only your own composted

Memory of flower smells.

It’s hard to picture Brooklyn

Of ample hills, horse-drawn carts,

And a few surviving farms,

But you turn to your mashed-up

Recall of illustrations

And blurred early photographs

And sort of get the idea.

You understand their impulse

To imagine a reader

Discovering their phrases

Long after the poet left.

And, what do you know, Tagore

Was correct—a century

Later, still a few readers,

Longer, and more, for Whitman.

Still it’s a sad connection,

Like prisoners with a wall

Of solid stone between them,

One tapping out faint signals,

The other one listening,

Only listening, only

Able to decode the taps,

Not to send anything back.

Who are you reader, reading?

You can’t answer, can’t ever

Respond to the dead poets

To tell them something got through.