Poems are hard as atom bombs e e cummings said one day at the beach wavelets laurels in your hair when Lowell (et al) decried his couth unstrictured voice your words are gulls and there a whale, beached promethean, slowly dying watching its own death with that naive, ancient eye a heart so slow it measures time in intangibles like love songs still, while you tear at the monster’s side tears like quills hoping for the ambergris of too studied convention I will bend my shoulder to a poem in the returning tide watch it with an evening’s shadow grace descend