Only we poets are brave enough
To appear utterly bare before one another,
Wearing just our prejudices, our obsessions
The vanishing epiphanies of the hour; trials of the day
Disheveled, reeling drunk on what we're trying to say:
Our own individual truth wrung out of the day's dollar, or the day's scarcity.
Tongue-tied in our despair to say it perfectly
Hedging all on the compassionate intuition of our peers-
Other authors, who are much the same deep down,
Feeling things together, as if poised inside one being;
One omnipotent beating heart, vibrating the worlds fragile equanimity.
Maybe I might have passed through life never suspecting this
But I know there is a potential power
Which lives inside words, because things have changed for me
In subtle ways I could not have foreseen:
I was finally able to admit those parts of me
Which I considered unfit for human consumption
Or else too abstract to put down on paper-
To dredge, lever them upwards;
The good, the bad, the heretical, the complacent;
All the unbridled creatures I had set a lock upon, and tried to forget
And instead of being frightened away, you came closer
To see what lay behind, what was opening up inside-
Even if you should have been running any other direction instead-
Now that is a true friend, as true as you may ever find,
Anywhere you ever go.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem