Impossible

It’s so hard, trying to write, be it

at home, on a plane above the ocean,

over a black forest, in the evening stillness.

Always starting afresh, reaching

full speed and fifteen minutes later

giving up, in reluctant surrender.

I hope that you at least can hear me,

—since, as you know, the theoreticians remind us

insistently, almost daily, that we’ve missed

the point, as usual we’ve skipped

the deeper meaning, we’ve been reading

the wrong books, alas,

we’ve drawn the wrong conclusions.

They claim poetry is fundamentally impossible,

a poem is a hall where faces dissolve

in a golden haze of spotlights, where the fierce

rumblings of an angry mob drown out

defenseless single voices.

So what then? Fine words perish quickly,

ordinary words rarely persuade.

All the evidence suggests silentium

claims only a handful of adherents.

Sometimes I envy the dead poets,

they no longer have “bad days,” they don’t know

“ennui,” they’ve parted ways with “vacancy,”

“rhetoric,” rain, low-pressure zones,

they’ve stopped following the “shrewd reviews,”

but they keep speaking to us.

Their doubts vanished with them,

their rapture lives.