THIRTY-EIGHT (Certainty)

If thou regret’st thy youth, why live?

– Lord Byron

At seventeen a poet

fancies himself

                   Rimbaud

stomping on tables

and pissing in complacent coffee cups.

At twenty-one he’s Byron

trying out for size

                             his muse

on every caprice –

a madman shooting flaming arrows

never staying for the blaze.

By thirty Yeats and Eliot call

mystical, cynical, bewildered;

enamoured still of conceits

but

faithless in effect;

squinting through swirling sands

at a shadow that may be

a slouching beast –

or just

a marching line of afternoons

          and coffee spoons.

No sane illusion

survives to middle-age.

A poet ages faster

and more slow

digging

with the pen

for unsellable gems;

labouring

          not for an audience or

himself, but

the work –

certain as dying Keats

that his name is writ in water.