Three Types of Poetics

 

Some poetics is vacuous—no soul in sight

or ever heard or ever listened to—no temple

opened for the heart—either high or deep

or widely ample—but the verbose tower

 

still could be vast, enormous like a Babel built

with bricks of New York City’s phone books.

Then there is the other poetics dipped into muck

(though there is another short word people love

 

to use and put their mouths into), the weighty stuff

and blackness that sticks and smells and feels like Styx,

something where Thetis might have wanted to dip

her son Achilles’ heel that to anti-soul gets as close

 

as Gods or Hell would ever allow us—if the point

were to enlarge the creepiness of nether powers,

and there—since so much is darkly dyed in gloom—

the meaning, the say, must be tortured out of mind

 

almost as much out of the verse’s secretive behind

for, to be honest, in there, when all is done and said,

isn’t that much of love—but shades of seeded hatred.

Then there’re poems like those of lovers by the Ilisus stream.