success having just placed his own sestina

in a national tonsorial magazine.

Who really cares about most little magazines?

Eventually not even their own contributors

who having published a few preliminary sestinas

send their work East to prove they’re no longer students.

They need to be recognized as the new arbiters of taste

so they can teach their own graduate workshops.

Where will it end? This grim cycle of workshops

churning out poems for little magazines

no one honestly finds to their taste?

This ever-lengthening column of contributors

scavenging the land for more students,

teaching them to write their boot-camp sestinas?

Perhaps there is an afterlife where all contributors

have two workshops, a tasteful little magazine, and sexy students

who worshipfully memorize their every sestina.

THE SILENCE OF THE POETS

is something to be grateful for.

Once there were so many books, so many poets.

All the masterpieces one could never read,

indistinguishable even then

among the endless shelves of the unreadable.

Some claim the best stopped writing first.

For the others, no one noted when or why.

A few observers voiced their mild regret

about another picturesque, unprofitable craft

that progress had irrevocably doomed.

And what was lost? No one now can judge.

But we still have music, art, and film,

diversions enough for a busy people.

And even poetry for those who want it.

The old books, those the young have not defaced,

are still kept somewhere,

stacked in their dusty rows.

And a few old men may visit from time to time

to run their hands across the spines

and reminisce,

but no one ever comes to read

or would know how.

MONEY

Money is a kind of poetry.

—WALLACE STEVENS

Money, the long green,

cash, stash, rhino, jack

or just plain dough.

Chock it up, fork it over,

shell it out. Watch it

burn holes through pockets.

To be made of it! To have it

to burn! Greenbacks, double eagles,

megabucks and Ginnie Maes.

It greases the palm, feathers a nest,

holds heads above water,

makes both ends meet.

Money breeds money.

Gathering interest, compounding daily.

Always in circulation.

Money. You don’t know where it’s been,

but you put it where your mouth is.

And it talks.

THE NEXT POEM

How much better it seems now

than when it is finally done—

the unforgettable first line,

the cunning way the stanzas run.

The rhymes soft-spoken and suggestive

are barely audible at first,

an appetite not yet acknowledged

like the inkling of a thirst.

While gradually the form appears

as each line is coaxed aloud—

the architecture of a room

seen from the middle of a crowd.

The music that of common speech

but slanted so that each detail

sounds unexpected as a sharp

inserted in a simple scale.

No jumble box of imagery

dumped glumly in the reader’s lap

or elegantly packaged junk

the unsuspecting must unwrap.

But words that could direct a friend

precisely to an unknown place,