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Attitude And Mood Conclude
[after Wallace Stevens]
When the last poems of the poet he most
admired began to make more than just plain sense,
he knew that he had arrived at that point
where and when prospects and perspectives were
no longer the exclusive provenance
of others who were not willing to share.
Fears of aging, or eventual death,
just dropped away like brittlle leaves of some
noxious weed that could not survive autumn.
The time and place reminded him of his
first return home, from the alma mater,
five weeks and a few days more to enjoy.
He knew, then, that he was no longer the
shadow of his parents---always obliged
to reflect, obscurely, the dimensions
they had narrowed to merely sharp edges.
Nor was he only the crass amateur
lacking degree before stale professors.
Voices in the air's transmissions welcomed
his own among them, banded citizens
of a more poetic realm. That was some
forty years ago. Now the poems he has
admired invite him to a peak's plateau---
his to explore, to measure and describe
as broadly and minutely as he cares
(in the same way as forty years ago,
each moment was clothed as an adventure),
as his own poems are multiplied and thrive
under the light of one star, or many.
Starward
[jlc]
