Stanley & Adrienne

The street I live and write in

was not a left-wing poet.

I also think of Bernstein,

wild and metaphysic heart —

the risk-taking of one who

makes my poems and lives my life

heavy as the white-lipped boy

from my whole erotic self.

My mother never forgave

your life for the privilege.

My themes and the use I have

dream of a common language.

Images glimpses questions,

art with economic power

are mindful of your garden —

the poet-scholar-martyr.

Bowels of the hippodrome,

great crashing alexandrines,

comets trailing tender spume —

edge of meaning yet can mean.

My mother’s breast was thorny —

think the art of translation,

if anything, makes poetry

your turn. Grass of confusion

is something more powerful —

the cry of writhing nerve-ends,

impaired intellectual.

You are, in a word, avid.

[this poem of 7-syllable line, abab rhyming quatrains is a cento; each line is an unaltered excerpt from two books: Stanley Kunitz's Collected Poems & Adrienne Rich's Arts of the Possible: Essays & Conversations]

— 6 July 2013