Is It Is
Alphabetizing poems I want to keep,
in a Word file I save on my desktop:
with a new file every January,
keeping track of what seems best to retain.
I’ve done this since my first computer
and before that for decades in notebooks;
some lost, some maybe so; perhaps they’re still
behind my desk in a drawer I don’t open.
Yesterday I added Philip Levine;
this was “One for the Rose,” as it happened,
fondly recalled from many years ago
and conveniently reprinted recently.
If The New Yorker hadn’t published it,
I doubt that he’d be there—though I checked and
found the same poem in Twenty-Fifteen—
above Robert Lowell’s “Words for Hart Crane.”
Levine came right after my own poems
and mine for the moment underneath Keats:
glorious temporary juxtaposition,
but just until I dropped in Kenneth Koch,
then after mine added Larkin, two Phils
filling up that space for now, two men so
very different. I met Levine one time,
a sweet man like his friend, my neighbor Bill.
Below Levine for now is Ardre Lorde.
Did their paths cross in Fresno or New York?
Then come Merwin, Shahib Nye, and Rilke,
Saint John of the Cross, Charles Simic, and Mark Strand…
If you’ll pardon my saying so, there’s no
rhyme or reason. Same as in bookstores and
libraries, where anyone can remove
anyone. I don’t do that, I just add.
It’s that way with everything: recipes,
souvenirs, favorite hiking trails, lovers.
All add up. Seems so precious at the time,
and the fact of the matter is it is.
Marty Krasney’s poetry and short stories have been published in Areté, Courtship of Winds, Innisfree, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Frost Meadow Review, MacGuffin, Marlboro Review, Missouri Review, Mudlark, Tricycle, and Witness. He has completed a novel, The Bees of the Invisible.
Thin Air 