At age twenty-five, my poetic life began.
I claimed a matronymic - Gilchrist Haas.
Verse would guarantee anonymity and health.
I’d wage, on certainty, poetry’s war of chance,
the outcome of which would define my time,
becoming discernable only at the end.
Today we poets no longer need to defend
our ways and means, what we should do or can.
The poet’s been reduced to an inverted mime.
Where eyes and ears are absent, there is nor applause
nor critic’s censure for the metric dance -
now a set of wranglings between poet and self…
though solitude does become its own sort of wealth,
as I gauge how far beyond the next bend
some latter-day Age of Chivalry or Romance
may give rise to a new, Sapphonic master plan -
Li Po there to confute Confucian laws -
and lead to new vistas of unmelodied rhyme.
Alas, poetry today is a quiet crime,
quietly sitting on its quiet shelf,
stretches on stretches away from the bloody maws
of the curs on whom the banes of free thought depend.
Can I claim what I do for fun is banned?
It’s merely silenced in a restless sort of trance.
Unsatisfied, my need is like so many ants
on the bark of a tree that I must climb,
as it towers over the ground on which I stand,
usurping me by dint of arboreal stealth.
It’s true, ants…this tree is more than my friend!
But let’s unfurther this metaphor. Here I’ll pause.
…
Poetry imitates certainty clause by clause,
making comic theater of its rants,
quite aware of what little time there’s left to spend,
and considering its own insight somewhat blind…
or at least I am - its scrivening elf -
though content that I may caretake its silent span.
Muse! For the sake of the time in which I began
and will end, grant me the best of both health
and, if not fortune, precious chance.
Signed,
Gilchrist Haas.