POETRY LOVE
by Michael Blumenthal
It must be wonderful to be so obsessed with poetry
that you live it, breathe it, consider every moment without it
a moment wasted want to do nothing else but write it, read it,
recite it to your friends and lovers it must be wonderful
to have only this one mission for your life, this singular sense
of purpose and pursuit, or perhaps it’s terrible, as a friend
once suggested to me over lunch in Cambridge, eating nothing
but ice cream all the time, perhaps it’s awful to live on
so restricted a diet even of beauty and pleasure even of language
outgrowing itself I think I might side with those who think
it’s terrible on this beautiful morning in West Virginia, with
the purple vetch and spring beauties and larkspur and bluebells
blossoming so perfectly, it must be horrible to want to go
perpetually turning everything into poetry to not simply allow
the sacred its moment as the sacred, the profane its tenure
as the profane oh one can get so fat from eating too much ice cream,
the arteries clogging, the waistline expanding the breath coming
in shorter and shorter gasps until you die of it and are left wishing
you’d at least been able to master the art of prose.
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Blumenthal.
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