He didn't want to do it with skill, <br />He'd had enough of skill. If he never saw <br />Another villanelle, it would be too soon; <br />And the same went for sonnets. If it had been <br />Hard work learning to rime, it would be much <br />Harder learning not to. The time came <br />He had to ask himself, what did he want? <br />What did he want when he began <br />That idiot fiddling with the sounds of things. <br /> <br />He asked himself, poor moron, because he had <br />Nobody else to ask. The others went right on <br />Talking about form, talking about myth <br />And the (so help us) need for a modern idiom; <br />The verseballs among them kept counting syllables. <br /> <br />So there he was, this forty-year-old teen-ager <br />Dreaming preposterous mergers and divisions <br />Of vowels like water, consonants like rock <br />(While everybody kept discussing values <br />And the need for values) , for words that would <br />Enter the silence and be there as a light. <br />So much coffee and so many cigarettes <br />Gone down the drain, gone up in smoke, <br />Just for the sake of getting something right <br />Once in a while, something that could stand <br />On its own flat feet to keep out windy time <br />And the worm, something that might simply be, <br />Not as the monument in the smoky rain <br />Grimly endures, but that would be <br />Only a moment's inviolable presence, <br />The moment before disaster, before the storm, <br />In its peculiar silence, an integer <br />Fixed in the middle of the fall of things, <br />Perfected and casual as to a child's eye <br />Soap bubbles are, and skipping stones.<br /><br />Howard Nemerov<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-host-he-says-that-all-is-well/
