Umbriate Press Poetry

(for Ezra Pound, also dead)

I appreciate that you are not too weighted by sin
(an aristocratic pleasure unduly adored),
having sought no turn of mind but in the crowning
gesture of your own achievements,
be they as shallow as the Sargasso Sea
littered with the pestilence of your verbal debris.

Your mind, like milk, a fatty thing indeed, thinks
more or less than it can afford of ideas and oddities,
things of a bent but not of a breed,
such tragedy. Indeed!

Great lips have you, I admit,
as have those who reached them through your wit
although only to a marginal degree
by less strategy than pluck.
Still facts point to the corner where you sit
waiting hours for a single stare
a rich glance or tarnished grin —
trophies all to the glory of your patience.

Are these not your treasures stored in memory — 
a splinter in exile, no finger worthy
of your half-hearted try,
that sparsely clad ornament of your latest gesture
unseen and felt for ages?
For all this depth of character you puddle lightly in the rain, 
or is it in the brain where idles away
the gaudy work of all your wonders?