Friday, January 18, 2019

First draft/ The Poems Themselves























When the poet dies
it isn't like the end of coal
or the domestic auto industry.
The assembly lines don't pause
lake freighters aren't stilled at their docks
few jobs are lost, mortgages defaulted.

If they were old

maybe the poems ended years ago,
and their publisher has been compiling
their old essays for decades.

And after some lamentations, public

private, their world will still
save for the whispering, 
rustling of the poems themselves
as someone in need of something
alights among them
and learns of the smell of an old barn
in 1956 or the look on the faces of deer.

Guy

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