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APPRECIATIONS: FOUR POETS
1
(For Andrew Glaze)Glaze swaggers to the plate
Like a home-run king,
Spits in his hands
Like a good old boy
And smashes complacencies
Over the outfield fence.
If they aren’t subdued enough
By such battering
He’ll open his shirt to reveal
Apocalypse where his number ought to be:
The horsemen off and pursuing.
Jim Story__
APPRECIATIONS: FOUR POETS
11
(For Anthony Hecht)Hecht inhabits the house
Of his poems, that delicately carved
And polished mansion,
Like a ghost who remembers
The weight of his blood.
I watch from the outside
His sharp-visaged silhouette
Scavenge among hard-edged
Squares of light for light.Jim Story __
©CTvM: Alarm clock
-Happiness knows no time-1973
APPRECIATIONS: FOUR POETS
1V
(For Howard Nemerov)Nemerov is the Prince
Of Conundrums, who makes Hamlet blush.
The most elegant flip-flop artist
In the Western World,
Balancing on a tadpole.
(It is slippery, but he will try.)
But I warn thee, fishers of men:
That’s one whale of a tadpole.(Unearthed from my archives, 1977)
Jim Story__
APPRECIATIONS: FOUR POETS
111
(For Jack Gilbert)The search goes on:
San Francisco, Paris,
The Agaean, New York,
India. For elephants
And Alcibiades.
For an audience
That will know him
As Orpheus and attend.
His poems Giacometti sculptures
Beat from bronze.
Lucid as raw pain.
His humor no brush of feathers
Along a rib
But the tickle
Of scalpels.
Even his wit
Drips blood.
Jim Story__