09-30-2023, 02:03 AM
The Selfishness of the Poetry Reader
Sometimes I think I'm the only man in America
who reads poems
and who walks at night in the suburbs,
calling the moon names.
And I'm certain I'm the single man who owns
a house with bookshelves,
who drives to work without a CD player,
taking the long way, by the ocean breakers.
No one else, in all America,
quotes William Meredith verbatim,
cites Lowell over ham and eggs, and Levertov;
keeps Antiworlds and Ariel beside his bed.
Sometimes I think no other man alive
is changed by poetry, has fought
as utterly as I have over "Sunday Morning"
and vowed to love those difficult as Pound.
No one else has seen a luna moth
flutter over Iowa, or watched
a woman's hand lift rainbow trout from water,
and snow fall onto Minnesota farms.
This country wide, I'm the only man
who spends his money recklessly on thin
volumes unreviewed, enjoys
the long appraising look of check-out girls.
How could another in America know why
the laundry from a window laughs,
and how plums taste, and what an auto wreck
feels like—and craft?
I think that I'm the only man who speaks
of fur and limestone in one clotted breath;
for whom Anne Sexton plunged in Grimm; who can't
stop quoting haikus at some weekend guest.
The only man, in all America, who feeds
on something darker than his politics,
who writes in margins and who earmarks pages—
in all America, I am the only man.
~Dick Allen
Sometimes I think I'm the only man in America
who reads poems
and who walks at night in the suburbs,
calling the moon names.
And I'm certain I'm the single man who owns
a house with bookshelves,
who drives to work without a CD player,
taking the long way, by the ocean breakers.
No one else, in all America,
quotes William Meredith verbatim,
cites Lowell over ham and eggs, and Levertov;
keeps Antiworlds and Ariel beside his bed.
Sometimes I think no other man alive
is changed by poetry, has fought
as utterly as I have over "Sunday Morning"
and vowed to love those difficult as Pound.
No one else has seen a luna moth
flutter over Iowa, or watched
a woman's hand lift rainbow trout from water,
and snow fall onto Minnesota farms.
This country wide, I'm the only man
who spends his money recklessly on thin
volumes unreviewed, enjoys
the long appraising look of check-out girls.
How could another in America know why
the laundry from a window laughs,
and how plums taste, and what an auto wreck
feels like—and craft?
I think that I'm the only man who speaks
of fur and limestone in one clotted breath;
for whom Anne Sexton plunged in Grimm; who can't
stop quoting haikus at some weekend guest.
The only man, in all America, who feeds
on something darker than his politics,
who writes in margins and who earmarks pages—
in all America, I am the only man.
~Dick Allen