What It Takes

It takes so much to make a poem
   even a small and faithful one
   bucolic quatrain stoic epitaph
   haiku’s reticent gesture
it takes entire planets whole
   solar systems the vast peculiar
   cosmos of a carefully prepared
   understanding

Let’s admit it poetry is not very
   efficient the genuine article
   demands all the light one mind
   can absorb to release such
   astonishing force
it asks every atom of our being
   to detonate the private
   Hiroshima of insight the
   half-life of lingering
   implication
poetry is destructive yes it has
   split more than one planet in
   two and yet it yields no more
   than the energy of which it is
   composed

Poetry demands a lot and the
   contents of a poem are not
   economical either
to describe even a glass of water
   necessitates several oceans
to observe so much as a hillock a
   knoll a rise requires an
   enormous range Carpathians
   the Hindu Kush and surely
   Shelley scaled many peaks
   getting a grip on Mont Blanc
what endless rivers flowed when
   Stevens gazed across the
   fateful one that runs past
   Haddam Meadows
how many soldiers died as
   Homer cut his hero down in
   dust

Poetry asks everything
it asks all the poems that have
   ever been all the people and
   places things and thoughts
poetry is to seek everywhere to
   find in any object no detail too
   cunning for it no elaboration
   too grandiose
it appears profligate
it shows itself multitudinous
it looks to overlap infinity or so
   it seems to the man at his
   keyboard each morning
   struggling to assemble
   materials
poetry wants whole worlds

But in fact it’s not that easy
there exists just one world
   really and in it just several
   poets and in them only a very
   few poems