Late

A Plath, a Rimbaud, a Keats, a Crane—

A Li He, for that matter, from long

Before any of them—dying young

Enough that the death is part of it,

The impressiveness of all the things

Done—as, say, recently, Max Ritvo—

They all settle strangely in the mind,

Their completeness enhanced by a claim

To incompleteness, although often

No more fragmented than the whole heft

Of works seen as representative

Of fully lived poetic careers.

In blue-grey heaven’s thunder-stone script,

There are no verses and no poets

And no need of any of our gifts.

Writers are not being called away

To compose for a greater kingdom.

They are wrung out, like all other flesh.

But is there an acceleration,

Possibly, created on approach

Of the breath-summoning red dragon?

This desert’s evening sky holds no shade

In any discernible palate.

It’s bare—neither white, nor blue, nor grey—

A brutally languorous twilight.

I can only hope there’s something left

It can wring from a bony old chest.