Friday, October 23, 2009

Some Older American Poets by Frank Ormsby | Saturday poem

Time for more poems (& less ABOUT poems, performances & poets)... since this poem is about poets, is it a variant on ars poetica or something else? A paean to endurance...

 
 

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Some Older American Poets Borders Bookstore, White Plains, NY

Tired of the accomplished young men

and the accomplished young women,

their neat cerebral arcs and sphinctral circles,

their impeccable chic, their sudden precocious surge,

their claims to be named front-runner,

I have turned to the ageing poets – the marathon men,

the marathon women – the ones who breasted the tape

and simply ran on, establishing their own distance.

Home after another funeral they walk by the pond

with a sense of trees thinning and cold in the air,

yet thrill to the dog's passionate slapstick,

his candid arse-up in the debris of last year's storms.

You sprightly mortals, you rowdies at death's door,

for whom the last moment is not too late to begin!

I can't get enough of you, bright-eyed and poetry mad

in the fields next to the cemetery, where you drop to your knees

before the first flower in the world, where you lift your heads

to that bare cry among brambles, the original bird.


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