The sound of a poem makes a great deal of difference to me.
And poetry I think always occurs between the polarities of song
and speech in our era, and our right now poetry
is very close to speech, I think perilously
close to speech, flattened out.
There were other times such as in the Elizabethan time
when it was much, much closer to song.
This poem is about as close to song I think as I can get,
and still have some sense of the speaking voice in it that
will make it poetry for me.
It has one word in it, hydras, which was--
the hydra was a mythological beast, a water serpent,
that if one of that had many heads.
And if one of its heads was cut off, it would grow back again.
"Fire and Sleep."
I think of myself as dust of bones, mornings when I awake
to find the fine white ash lining the bottom of my box
stove.
Each night I slide in logs thicker
than the circle of my thigh, and watch them
all blaze for a while, because I am about to sleep and know
that what I see in fire and sleep
possesses me for no reason I can ever understand.
The fire in a dark room is the center of a dream.
Flames pulse as constant blue transparencies
inside yellow hydras that want me to become them as they
change and change again.
While on the underside begin orange coals
that should seem so cool and delicious on the tongue.
And all of it nothing by morning.