Classic Poem

Well. I guess the elegy is dead. If so, then
let's let it roll to rest-o. Exeunt omnes. Ergo,
timor mortis conturbat
me too, I reckon. Oh I get such green-edged vertigo
as the sick poet must have on the quickly lifting
bridge's shift of footing, or leaning peaked up above the grave
of his felo de se of a father down
in unlikely Oklahoma

(or wherever) toward the lower end of the fatherly
river, the bottom of the one old brown bottle
too. Christ. There is just not enough skin to go around,
not enough foolscap for the roll
of poets and fathers down the hatch of an
overdose of one thing or another,
not enough words. They fall behind and fall,
and love and fame to nothingness do sink. Keats.

We owe, I said, some words to our dear brothers dead
under the waters of our brother sea
or brotherly river, involuntarily long with elegies
turning the swollen helmet-hubs of hearses into mud.
The vehicles get no rest and never will, I
guess, until there's nobody left to steer
the last one, the day — part of this single ugly winter night
we constitute the punctuation of, the temporary commas — the day

when the one surviving bridge-enduring poet
must tie with cold fingers his even colder tie
and roll then himself unaided and alone
down the dim hill to the darkling hole,
releasing
the emergency brake
and letting the neutral gears
go wheeling free.

Well. I guess the elegy is dead. If so, then
let's let it roll to rest-o. Exeunt omnes. Ergo,
timor mortis conturbat
me too, I reckon. Oh I get such green-edged vertigo
as the sick poet must have on the quickly lifting
bridge's shift of footing, or leaning peaked up above the grave
of his felo de se of a father down
in unlikely Oklahoma

(or wherever) toward the lower end of the fatherly
river, the bottom of the one old brown bottle
too. Christ. There is just not enough skin to go around,
not enough foolscap for the roll
of poets and fathers down the hatch of an
overdose of one thing or another,
not enough words. They fall behind and fall,
and love and fame to nothingness do sink. Keats.

We owe, I said, some words to our dear brothers dead
under the waters of our brother sea
or brotherly river, involuntarily long with elegies
turning the swollen helmet-hubs of hearses into mud.
The vehicles get no rest and never will, I
guess, until there's nobody left to steer
the last one, the day — part of this single ugly winter night
we constitute the punctuation of, the temporary commas — the day

when the one surviving bridge-enduring poet
must tie with cold fingers his even colder tie
and roll then himself unaided and alone
down the dim hill to the darkling hole,
releasing
the emergency brake
and letting the neutral gears
go wheeling free.