THE AMERICAN POETS

The painter came the other day

    to paint the room.

Bookshelves had to be moved, yes---

    the big heavy one

holding our one hundred "Best Books"

    of two hundred years of

American independence...

Leather-bound, gold-leafed, and 

    lettered and stamped

with gold designs...these books

    were published from 1976 to 1984.

A picture was I, an old guy, sitting in

    my favorite rocker, dusting and 

hefting each volume, marveling at its

    beauty, its quality, its weight---

(It is twice as heavy as a regular

    book!)

and thumbing through the pages, made

    of special paper, to last a 

thousand years.

    

This turned out to be a slow task for me...

     but loving books as I always have, 

I didn't care how long it lasted...

     In my busy earning years, I had 

neglected these books---especially

     the poetry volumes, all of 

which were now calling to me....

After thirty years or more, in a safe, dry

     shelf,  these books still had it;

A combination smell of "book," and 

    "leather." I had to smell 

every book.

I was separating the poetry books from

    the histories, novels, and plays.

For you poetry lovers, here is a list of

    American poets with volumes

in our set: Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane,

    Marianne Moore, Walt Whitman,

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, W.H. Auden,

    Edward Arlington Robinson,

Wallace Stevens, Ralph Waldo Emerson,

    William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost,

and e.e. cummings.

Not until we had begun painting, and laid 

    the books around me in a circle, 

had I taken the time to delve into 

     some of these poets.

Lately I have been trying to read a good bit

    in one or more of them every day---

At times I have been almost "bowled over,"

    as I encounter great difficulty

in understanding them..all of them

    at times...and yet surprisingly,

they all have poems of simplicity.

And can you imagine the daunting task

    they faced when writing poems sixty 

or seventy pages long, as most of them 

     did at one time or another?

One reads with awe and respect,

    mindful that these, our own

American "men of letters," passed

    by here and left a great legacy...

They literally scraped--emptied--their

    minds, and left the resulting

messages for us!

We need  to read their poetry and try to

     grasp their innermost thoughts.

           

(Remember the English poet Robert

    Browning, who in "Andrea Del Sarto,"

said: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed

    his grasp, or what's a heaven for?")

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BY MIL

02/12/14