Where are you?

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I waited to find the house and waited
to buy furniture and all until you turned up, so
we’d choose everything together.
(I tell folks I’ve chosen a life of poverty.)
The hunting and gathering would be little odysseys
which chosen stuff would emblemize only to us.
You’d accept my library, though. But it’s too big,
legacy of a life though it be. I’ve waited for you
to cull the massive thing with me for giving
books to libraries. Where are you?
There are so many places we have to find—never to be
tourists, we swear, rather living wherever
as long as we choose.

But this isn’t melancholy; it’s a fun moment
of fiction as writing you is fiction,

I thought when I happened onto a great response to M.H. Abrams,
The Fourth Dimension of a Poem and Other Essays,
in the June 20 New York Review of Books, topped with an image
of old Abrams in his pretty living room, laughing
heartily, and my first reaction was “too Modernist.”
And what about absence of poiesis, old lamp, what about unlyrical
métiers of lives that can’t find a Yeatsian mirror
echoing in a Bloom heralding genius in the peaks,
old man, waning canon, one to die soon, one to keep living.

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