The host he says that all is well

He didn't want to do it with skill,

He'd had enough of skill.

If he never

Another villanelle, it would be too soon;

And the same went for sonnets.

If it had

Hard work learning to rime, it would be

Harder learning not to.

The time

He had to ask himself, what did he want?

What did he want when he

That idiot fiddling with the sounds of things.

He asked himself, poor moron, because he

Nobody else to ask.

The others went right

Talking about form, talking about

And the (so help us) need for a modern idiom;

The verseballs among them kept counting syllables.

So there he was, this forty-year-old

Dreaming preposterous mergers and

Of vowels like water, consonants like rock(While everybody kept discussing

And the need for values), for words that

Enter the silence and be there as a light.

So much coffee and so many

Gone down the drain, gone up in smoke,

Just for the sake of getting something

Once in a while, something that could

On its own flat feet to keep out windy

And the worm, something that might simply be,

Not as the monument in the smoky

Grimly endures, but that would

Only a moment's inviolable presence,

The moment before disaster, before the storm,

In its peculiar silence, an

Fixed in the middle of the fall of things,

Perfected and casual as to a child's

Soap bubbles are, and skipping stones.

Howard Nemerov was born on February 29th, 1920 in New York.

He died of cancer at his home in University City,

Missouri on July 5th 1991.