The Poet

I see the book finished and bound upon the table,

an impressive heavy thing of leather and ink,

before the first word is ever conceived or spoken.

The ink still sleeps inside the cuttlefish beneath dark water.

✴

A boy stands on a high hill, shouting to the sky.

He does not know he is a poet yet.

He only feels the immense pressure of song bursting out.

The old man who he will become sits by a small fire,

warming his cold limbs and smiling at the memory of that boy.

He remembers the shouting, though he has long since lost his voice.

✴

The printing press clacks and stamps in the smoky room.

The hot lead smells like something burning.

This happens long after the poem is forgotten by the public

and long before the poet decides to sit down with a blank sheet.

✴

A thought strikes like lightning in the middle of a dream,

a brilliant line about the cosmos and the souls of men.

But the pen wrote it down two decades ago,

the page yellowed and torn by the wind.

✴

I hail the confusion of the universe,

the way a life spreads out like a vast terrain

where the beginning and the end touch each other.

The child is the father of the man, and the man is the ghost of the child,

all their voices intertwined into one song.

✴

The ink spills on the wood before the well is filled.

The song is heard by the crowd before the mouth opens.

We do not walk a straight path from birth to the grave.

We inhabit the whole territory at once.