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.
