I believe many fine poems begin with ideas,
but if you tell too many faces this, or tell it too loudly,
they will get the wrong idea.

Now here is something really interesting (to me),
something you can use at a standing-up-only party when
everyone is tired of hearing there are

one million
three thousand
two hundred
ninety five

words used by the Esimo for snow. This is what Ezra Pound
learned from Ernest Fenollosa: Some languages are so constructed—English
among them—that we each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime.

That sentence begins with your first words,
toddling around the kitchen,
and ends with your last words,
right before you step into
the limousine,
or in a nursing home,
the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand.

Or, if you are blessed,
they are heard by someone who knows you and loves you and will be
and loves you and will be.
sorry to hear the sentence end.

When I told Mr. Angel about the lifelong sentence, he said:
“Thats a lot of semicolons!” he is absolutely right;
the sentence would be unwieldy and awkward and resemble the
novel of a savant, but the next time you use a semicolon
(which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry)
you should stop.





*be thankful that there exists this little thing,
invented by a human being—an Italian as a matter of fact—that allows us to go
on and keep on connecting speech that for all apparent purposes is unrelated;