notes on poetry: the fairest thing I leave behind

is sunlight / then shining stars and the full moon's face / and also ripe cucumbers, and apples and pears

One of the better things about poetry is that no one mistakes its utterance for the laying down of the law, not for the law of the state or society nor that of God nor that of any other kind of father. No one obeys a poem, and even if they tried to, the poem would vanish at the attempt, and obedience, also, find itself transmuted via eccentric application – one moment, devotion, then teeth-gritting contempt, then at least, intractability.  

A poem is no employment handbook with beige heartlessness, either, nor are most poems effective guides to etiquette. Poetry is not even like natural law, unless it is the low-down law of nature in its ironic moods like that time someone I know saw a snake eating a frog and believed they had seen a frog with a very long, snake-shaped tail. 

Poetry is not like the law of the mother – no single commandment: "survive." Instead, the words of poems lemming-rush into the air of oblivion, perfectly willing to be lost with all the others. When a poem survives, that's trouble for the gods and hell for the mortal-immortal binary. Each discovery of a poem that lives beyond its maker is still, to me, imbued with a warm feeling for the perversity of its endurance. I still cannot believe that we have, for example, Praxilla's ancient cucumbers and stars, or Li Bae's 8th century heartbreaker:

I met Tu Fu on a mountaintop

in August when the sun was hot.

Under the shade of his big straw hat

his face was sad--

in the years since we last parted,

he'd grown wan, exhausted.

Poor old Tu Fu, I thought then,

he must be agonizing over poetry again.

Even the most chilly and oracular poetry fails splendidly at its legislations.  It is impossible to do what the poems tell us, at least in so many words. Poems are instructions that can never be followed, forms that can never be filled. Poetry is a rival government, says William Carlos Williams, always in opposition to its cruder replicas. How can it be that poems do all this and yet we do not everything for them?