those few unshakeable details

that no confusion can erase.

And the real subject left unspoken

but unmistakable to those

who don’t expect a jungle parrot

in the black and white of prose.

How much better it seems now

than when it is finally written.

How hungrily one waits to feel

the bright lure seized, the old hook bitten.

ELEGY WITH SURREALIST PROVERBS AS REFRAIN

“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton.

He carried a rose inside his coat each day

to give a beautiful stranger—“Better to die of love

than love without regret.” And those who loved him

soon learned regret. “The simplest surreal act

is running through the street with a revolver

firing at random.” Old and famous, he seemed démodé.

There is always a skeleton on the buffet.

Wounded Apollinaire wore a small steel plate

inserted in his skull. “I so loved art,” he smiled,

“I joined the artillery.” His friends were asked to wait

while his widow laid a crucifix across his chest.

Picasso hated death. The funeral left him so distressed

he painted a self-portrait. “It’s always other people,”

remarked Duchamp, “who do the dying.”

I came. I sat down. I went away.

Dali dreamed of Hitler as a white-skinned girl—

impossibly pale, luminous and lifeless as the moon.

Wealthy Roussel taught his poodle to smoke a pipe.

“When I write, I am surrounded by radiance.

My glory is like a great bomb waiting to explode.”

When his valet refused to slash his wrists,

the bankrupt writer took an overdose of pills.

There is always a skeleton on the buffet.

Breton considered suicide the truest art,

though life seemed hardly worth the trouble to discard.

The German colonels strolled the Île de la Cité—

some to the Louvre, some to the Place Pigalle.

“The loneliness of poets has been erased,” cried Éluard,

in praise of Stalin. “Burn all the books,” said dying Hugo Ball.

There is always a skeleton on the buffet.

I came. I sat down. I went away.

AUTUMN INAUGURAL

I.

There will always be those who reject ceremony,

Who claim that resolution requires no fanfare,

Those who demand the spirit stay fixed

Like a desert saint, fed only on faith,

To worship in no temple but the weather.

There will always be the austere ones

Who mount denial’s shaky ladder

To drape the statues or whitewash the frescoed wall,

As if the still star of painted plaster

Praised creation less than the evening’s original.

And they are right. Symbols betray us.

They are always more or less than what

Is really meant. But shall there be no

Processions by torchlight because we are weak?

What native speech do we share but imperfection?

II.

Praise to the rituals that celebrate change,

Old robes worn for new beginnings,

Solemn protocol where the mutable soul,

Surrounded by ancient experience, grows

Young in the imagination’s white dress.

Because it is not the rituals we honor