Sound As A Bench Poem by Michael Pruchnicki

Poetry should be mysterious as silence
and as sound as a bench
and as hard as a floor

so I read in poems
by Denise Levertov

Poets are like worms
building from their innards
castles of metaphor

She advises poets to relearn
the alphabet
from anguish and ardor
through somnolent grotto
to the flank of Pegasus
and home to the present

I learn more from one line
about the twelfth letter
of the alphabet
according to Levertov
than most of the stuff
other people have drilled
into me since puberty!