Classic Poem

So you want to see my papers, look what I have written down
'Twixt an ecstasy and heartbreak, con them over with a frown.
You would watch my thought's green sprouting ere a single blossom's blown.

Would you, friend? And what should I be doing, have you thought of that?
Is it pleasant, think you, being gazed upon from feet to hat,
Microscopically viewed by eyes commissioned just for that?

Don't assure me that your interest does not lie with me at all.
I'm a poet to be dissected for the good of science. Call
It by any name, I feel like some old root where fungi sprawl.

Think you, I could make you see it, all the little diverse strands
Locked in one short poem? By no means do I find your prying hands
Pleasure bearing and delightful straying round my lotus lands.

Not a word but joins itself with some adventure I alone
Could attach consideration to. You'd wrench me flesh from bone,
Find the heart and count its tappings. At your touch, 'twould turn to stone.

What is I, and what that other? That's your quest. I'll have you know
Telling it would break it from me, it would melt like travelled snow.
I will be no weary pathway for another's feet to go.

Seize the butterfly and wing it, thus you learn of butterflies.
But you do not ask permission of the creature, which is wise.
If I did consent, to please you, I should tell you packs of lies.

To one only will I tell it, do I tell it all day long.
Only one can see the patches I work into quilts of song.
Crazy quilts, I'm sure you'd deem them, quite unworthy of your prong.

One must go half-way with poets, feel the thing you're out to find,
Wonder even while you name it, keep it somehow still enshrined,
Still encased within its leafage like an arbour honey-vined.

Lacking just this touch and tremour, how can I but shrink and clutch
What I have to closer keeping. Little limping phantoms, such
Are my poems before I've taught them how to walk without a crutch.

You mean well, I do not doubt it, but you're blind as any mule.
Would you question a mad lover, set his love-making to rule?
With your pulse upon his finger, watch him play the sighing fool?

Would he win the lady, tell me, with you by? Your calculations
Might frustrate a future teeming with immeasurable equations.
Which will prove the most important, your research or his relations?

Take my answer then, for, flatly, I will not be vivisected.
Life is more to me than learning. If you clumsily deflected
My contact with what I know not, could it surely be connected?

Scarcely could you, knowing nothing, swear to me it would be so.
Therefore unequivocally, brazenly, I tell you " No! "
To the fame of an avowal, I prefer my domino.

Still I have a word, one moment, stop, before you leave this room.
Though I shudder thinking of you wandring through my beds of bloom,
You may come with spade and shovel when I'm safely in the tomb.