1

A poet's speech begins a great way off.
A poet is carried far away by speech

by way of planets, signs, and the ruts
of roundabout parables, between yes and no,
in his hands even sweeping gestures from a bell-tower
become hook-like. For the way of comets

is the poet's way. And the blown-apart
links of causality are his links. Look up
after him without hope. The eclipses of
poets are not foretold in the calendar.

He is the one that mixes up the cards
and confuses arithmetic and weight.
He is the questioner from the desk
the one who beats Kant on the head,

the one in the stone graves of the Bastille
who remains like a tree in its loveliness.
And yet the one whose traces have always vanished,
the train everyone always arrives
too late to catch

for the path of comets
is the path of poets: they burn without warming,
pick without cultivating. They are: an explosion, a breaking in-
and the mane of their path makes the curve of a
graph cannot be foretold by the calendar.

2

There are superfluous people about in
this world, out of sight, who
aren't listed in any directory: and
home for them is a rubbish heap.

They are hollow, jostled creatures:
who keep silent, dumb as dung, they are
nails catching in your silken hem
dirt imagined under your wheels.

Here they are, ghostly and invisible, the
sign is on them, like the speck of the leper.
People like Job in this world who
might even have envied him. If.

We are poets, which has the sound of outcast.
Nevertheless, we step out from our shores.
We dare contend for godhead, with goddesses,
and for the Virgin with the gods themselves.

3

Now what shall I do here, blind and fatherless?
Everyone else can see and has a father.
Passion in this world has to leap anathema
as it might be over the walls of a trench
and weeping is called a cold in the head.

What shall I do, by nature and trade
a singing creature (like a wire—sunburn! Siberia!)
as I go over the bridge of my enchanted
visions, that cannot be weighed, in a
world that deals only in weights and measures?

What shall I do, singer and first-born,
in a world where the deepest black is grey,
and inspiration is kept in a thermos?
with all this immensity
in a measured world?