Dead Poets

Lowell Boston2007

I’m sitting with perfect, weak tea

a poem about bullets in my hand

by a poet I’ll never meet

-- killed, by his subject,

ironically, so I’ve heard.

A failing chair cradles my weight

while the hungry smell of rosemary

presses the hedgerows outside.

In autumn’s light and October shade

the first stanza makes me

grin, as does the second’s

mouthful of candor.

And then it happens,

illuminating my unremarkable space,

a reference to the esoteric,

a swollen embodiment of hubris and want

-- Symbolic character to you and me.

There – line fourteen, center page!

It stops me cold, a foreign name

inaccessible in my casual read.

Seriously, I’m think, how am I to know who Cavalcanti is

or Aldo Buzzi as I microwave my lunch?

I’m pondering

still, during the spin cycle and the loading of whites.

Instant turn off.

Poet comes across as gloating,

‘Cause he’s smarter than me. I’m playing

catch up through Google and obsolete volumes

of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

It’s so much later before I can say, oh,

that’s what he’s talking about.

But it all comes together after a second read,

and I shovel off to bed, and pull down the sheets,

-- how the poet moved me even from the grave.

-- perhaps the only power left to him.

How I bettered myself

through his patient urgings and showing words.

Tomorrow during tea,

with his next poem in hand,

I’ll await another lesson

with unrehearsed palpitations.

Insight without prophylactic words.

Life from the dead.