Revisionist Poetry – Have you read the poet?, V.4

Have you read Irving Layton—so loud they praise him?
They say he’s fantastic, yet what lingers is small: his smile,
an imprint on the mind like a detached fly-wing—
a pale shard of motion, exact and obscene.

Have you listened to Whitman, the city’s long breath?
Do you find him lavish—spilling clauses like summer light?

Have you read Rod McKuen, whose words draw crowds?
They say he moves them, but only with a single-minded ache
for men and women—desire drawn round and round,
a moth tightening its orbit about a candle’s thin hunger.

Have you heard Leonard Cohen in his low room?
He eulogizes ironies—those beautiful, ruined lovers—
and watches them like small saints through Mount Royal dusk.

Have you read Alfred Tennyson, all armour and repose?
They call him chivalrous, but it is a courtesy of legend—
his poems in the heroic register: booths of mourning,
the widow steady at the gate, courage folded like old mail.

Have you thought of T. S. Eliot—ashes, altars, private prayers?
A life of fervent loves, the funerals of friends;
a cathedral of feeling left hollow at the center.

Have you read Henry David Thoreau, who kept slow calendars?
They say he was prescient—patient in the ledger of action,
recording experiments in living as if each day were a seed—
like a man who plants trees for winters he will never see.

Have you seen E. E. Cummings—eye and comma gone to play?
Can you find him in his typographic architecture,
those little scaffolds where words crouch and then leap?

Have you read the poet?
They say he’s expressive, eloquent in rumour—
but only in the seclusion of his room does he compose,
building, line by line, a private, careful language that breathes.