Poem to be Hummed
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I am standing before a gathering of those
whose eyes are a gentle sea barely visible, all of us viewing
something near the poetry that isn’t us,
nor the poet as he was then, nor even some fellow rowing,
keenly aware of his small presence:
a void so familiar we dare not fear it
or ask why we don’t recall it in other moments.

Where do visions go? To the same
sanctuary as jazz artists at the completion
of a set—that magical green room we’ve only dreamt of?
Are we not something other than what we are?
The slender librarian in a sheer flowered dress,
the canary-yellow convertible rolling by?
Visions of beauty survive in the preserve
for what we no longer keep.

Most of us know the green room
was never meant for us but for the mythological
jazz man with all his faults, unable to switch off
whatever it is within us that we could never
switch on, our emotions like acute angles—
more a fear of consumption by mouths
than the opposing pull of what we see before us:
that we seek out the myths that we believe in,
an endless space having enveloped us long ago.