Heartless in a Hartford long dissolved,
you were the axis
of my revolving world
when, at nineteen, I desired your gift
and Dylan Thomas’s:
his voluptuousness of mind,
your sensuous rigor.
I didn’t know then that Art
is the best one rises to,
a momentary privilege.
I didn’t know that bad men
could write good poems,
be spiteful to all,
cruel to their children,
but wholly compassionate
to ideal compassion.
Rude, icy, alert to advantage,
rapt but condescending,
terrified to be cornered
into a friendship,
you knew the dollar each lily concealed
and fantasized a Paris
laminated by distance,
whose essence you took
in strong, cunning draughts.
Few speak well of you,
the glacial man in the baggy suit.
The new biography makes me a fortuneteller
in reverse. I watch you weaken
in your garden robust with peonies
where you ushered in the world
and escaped your wife (whose face, on the liberty dime,
sat in your pants pocket all day).
But your poems, what madrigals,
canny and luscious, in which the Sinbads
of thought wear twirling knives,
and you steer by the polestar
of your own invention. Your nomadic eye
roamed the seven seas
of the seven senses.
By heart, and by law,
you could toss a bucketful of light
onto any dim object, make ideas fluoresce,
and stain the willows with a glance.
You named the chaos.
You could dry out the sun.
I wish you’d reveled in the deserts—
Egypt, Africa, the Southwest—
but it wasn’t your fault
that world is ampler than you knew.
Anyway, a coral key can be played
to the absolute,
and desert bluffs arrive by ship in New England,
where tide can be touched
and night is a leopard.