Poetics
by Paul Smyth

The poet pauses now

Sighs as he takes
Pleasure in those six lines he's written. So far,

Though rough, so good. Somehow

The mind that aches
With life keeps faith with words, with what they are.

His fingertips knead his brow,

He thinks of satellites

Circling the planet,
Their windmill-like collector panels facing

Sunward; and the storage sites

On Earth, a net
Of tilting polished dish-antennae tracing

The laser beams. He writes

Apollo banished and thinks

Of energy,
Those laser beams charged with the stuff that is

The shimmering greens and pinks

He would now see
Outside, the neon glow of town. But his

Desire is words. He blinks,

Imagining now a young

Girl writing in
Her locked, vinyl-bound diary, white and gold

Her jeans and jersey flung

On the bed, her thin
Arms bare, her bra lacy and pink but old.

Now, on the tip of her tongue,

The delicate phrase that will

Forevermore
Express the thrill and fire of him who was

Near her tonight, who still,

She's almost sure,
Can smell her cologne. Above the date she draws

A pale blue daffodil.

The poet closes his eyes

And sees a rock,
A slab of shale, the fossil imprint there

A clear amoeba. What dies

Becomes this clock
That never strikes but makes a man despair

Of language, and scrutinize

The lined palm of his hand.

Yet is this not
A form of speech, an oracular metaphor?

And does it not command

The salt that Lot
Embraced and wildly wept on, Cry out, implore

Your god to understand?

That makes him smile, and he

Gets up and goes
To open his window: the whoosh and glare of cars,

A distant siren, three

Trashcans, and those
Familiar voices from the stoop. Mars

Winks through a public tree.