Draw Near, Voices, to the City, to the City—but Do Not Draw Near!

Poems turn to other poems for help,
As humans turn to humans, and as other
Apes solicit tenderness and acceptance

From whatever conspecifics they may find
Themselves among, or, failing any, then
Perhaps their keepers. As hostages long

Isolated come to love the hostage-takers
Who stand watch over them, as solitary
Prisoners love spiders, rats, occasionally

Even guards, so does the lonely poem,
Struggling to keep itself going, often love
Whatever others of its kind it finds to love

Or whatever texts might still seem moving,
Minding their own unpoetic business,
Any company to talk with in an empty cell.

A poem in pain, languishing, might pine,
Might live or die for a little succor, a glance
From some dilatory essai de Montaigne.

Half the famous poems of China seem
To be loving echoes of famous poems past
That were lovingly echoing earlier ones.

And could there have been only a Beatrice,
No Aeneid in Divine Comedy? An Aeneid
Without an Iliad or Odyssey? On and on,

The lovers troop pairwise or in menages
Or in whole groups, back to the dawn
Of lonely words arranged to sing or scan.

Poems hand on poetry to poems, phrases
To phrases, since the first orphaned lines
Began wailing wherever sacred rivers ran.

But love can never change the fact
Poems are born abandoned and captured alone,
And handed off from person to person,

Callously, casually, dropped, forgotten,
Until they fall to pieces or are lost, and that
Is if they were fortunate and not suffocated

At birth, trembling on a barren waste
Of paper, like one of Dr. Harlow’s monkeys,
Only a wiry bit of scripture to call mother.