Minor Third

It was so easy to use third person pronouns, even though he knew
That you were a type of aggrandized I, and poetry
The mirror art of persuasion: like a painter (but why not a hog
Tyer or a chair maker, or just an old car?) who brushes in a little pink
By the glades of grass, the shrubbed outline or the link
In one long chain of flamingos where the eye might linger, rest
In the impressed vagrancies of epic herds; but a painting's made of paint
And poems of only words. Then he dabbled in being a poet, the dilettante who knew
Because he painted perfect chairs, what a chair was better than
The wood or the muzzle of a mangy pig or the corrugations of mettled rusts.
And when he spoke, the crowds came:
From Belgium
From Italy
From France
From Uganda
From Turkmenistan
From the snow-ripped poles, the steady sinews
Of Antarctica and Greenland,
Kentucky like Connecticut, the cuts
Of the green growing Everglades, the Granges and the Indian slopes.
All these crowds of people! Jesus, what bread, what cavorting in the isles!
And all for that glimmer of the word, the poet speaking
Plain and clearly in his authority. Pound them
With your purveyors of tropes, give them the clear outlines of a story
(And are you taking notes?) the word, the word, the invincible word
That the credible crowd clammered to hear, their crowed hats rising to catch
Like their fodder of worms, awful smells, or the silent ringing
Of the church-bells by easter islands, in the fogs and the frogs.
What did he say? Whole libraries and days of skin-prickling
Research, hole risings, settings of the vortexed sun. Let the poet
Be shot like a ringing call, let him rest in the vague mists that lick
The clicking cobble-stones and their corrosive feet, the sea's
Retreat. The whole world: what is this crippling mass
Of humanity and sound? He composed whole audiences
In a calm chair, he clung to the third person pronoun like the lair
Of some anonymous leopard or tiger, and dragged back his victims
To endless, sordid feasts of the flesh. There is no fresh air. You,
The long man, in the back, with the debauched eyes and the muzzled grin,
A question? Yes. If poetries persuasion, then
Can the grumbled bouish boulevards ever rest? We want a shivering wind,
Like a bucket of truth to foam up all this slop: test the way of the air
With a spittled finger, and grind your talcum-ed hair 'til the nard dripping
Ruth persuades you of fine intentions and tests new and ever more cultured inventions.