Poets


	ERIC GREEN
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POETS

At least once you should stand
Under a lit bar neon weeping rain
(This is best after a long drought)
And let that rain--chromatically radiated--
Run down along your upturned face.
Most people don't think of this.
There to stand moored in a storm,
This passage between life and death,
My body so close to the sill,
As close as a gun to the temple.
Listen,
Doesn't it all come down to this?
Listen, as the rain runs across my face,
Along my broken nose, over a poor shave,
Listen,
For a poet reaching out does make a sound.
Sure it's silent--a silence only for you to rend.
Silence is a sound, like the poem left unwritten.
(The ring of all the poems that never get heard.)
But we are all wrong anyway,
Because we can't be Jesus.
(Don't we hope to compare ourselves to Jesus
At least once?)
And when I pass through the portal,
Out in from the neon bright rain,
My wet foot prints on the tile,
And I take my stool with the lads,
Baudelaire, Bukowski, Rimbau, Rihaku,
They are all sitting quietly drinking,
All trying to look their worst, of course,
Dylan Thomas, Keats, and the unknowns,
They have no where to be any longer.
All the good and the bad poets
They are finally drinking together,
The door jamb bare of a door,
Always letting in a little rain.
Do you know what I say to them?
As my stool creaks and my arms touch wood,
As the wound at my temple no longer weeps,
As the lads barely look up from their drinks,
I say,
Some poems take you like a rain.
And then I order.