My Plumly
Love death and a good long think
he said are the occasions for poetry
If you can film it you can write it
Don’t worry about being a poet
just try to capture the moment
This is a terrible poem
Tone is everything tone is not
what you intend it’s what
you discover in the writing
I do favor a certain formalism
form is your father your mother
Pay attention to the music
Silence is one of your sources
or should be Never let the will
do the work of the imagination
If you want to grow as a poet
put yourself in your poem
Your obsessions are your prompts
You have centuries to turn to
learn from the poets before you
not as competition but as support
He knew which poets were drunks
When he recited poetry he’d quiet
to a whisper we’d lean in straining
You never stop revising your poems
until you die Bad writing
can kill you it should kill you
You should die of it You’re lucky
if you have five readers
Where is the poem taking place
you give up such power when you
don’t tell us Poems are elegies
if not why write them Passion
he insisted is what really matters
praised Frost’s Directive A poet
should never have the last word
when you end close the door quietly
Bear Den
Outside the window of your study two rows of leafing trees
on opposite sides of the street recede to a vanishing point.
This was the view from your hospice bed in your house
on Bear Den Road as you lay dying. Now your writing desk
is back in its place. What are the poet’s tools? Your typewriter,
for the clatter it made, and the feel of the keys on your fingertips.
I loved seeing your wall of books with a rolling ladder to reach them.
I loved inspecting your volumes by Keats, poems, letters, or about him.
As night comes on, the April light softens. Crepuscular,
the cyclical dying of the day, your favorite time.
The dead don’t want to take us with them, so often they
need our permission to let go. It’s we, the living,
who long to keep their company, to walk them home
so we’ll know where to find them when it’s our time.
In class when you conveyed how many men it took
to bear Emily Dickinson’s casket, your hands held
the precise heft of her. On my desk is a painting
of a bird perched on a tree-filled planet
with its tiny suitcase packed. Marble-blue Earth hangs
in the sky like a full moon. I was in Peebles, Ohio
when I heard you’d died. I walked outside,
it was dark enough to see the stars, I didn’t want shoes.
“Now you are a redwing black-bird,” I said out loud
to you who taught me listening.
______
These poems appeared in Delaplaine’s 2019 collection The Local World. Reprinted by permission of the author.