The Only Work

Glyn Maxwell (2002)

In memory of Agha Shahid Ali

When a poet leaves to see to all that matters,
nothing has changed. In treasured places still
he clears his head and writes.

None of his joie-de-vivre or books or friends
or ecstasies go with him to the piece
he waits for and begins,

nor is he here in this. The only work
that bonds us separates us for all time.
We feel it in a handshake,

a hug that isn't ours to end. When a verse
has done its work, it tells us there'll be one day
nothing but the verse,

and it tells us this the way a mother might
inform her son so gently of a matter
he goes his way delighted.

2007: The Oven Bird by Robert Frost

Element It Has

Glyn Maxwell (2007)

It may not be the same, what we appear
to thrive or slow or fade in, though across
its white expanses steadily we stare;

the only common element it has
is loss, and it may differ in the terms
it gives it. And it thickens with the days,

thins in the night as if it more than seems
a carbon thing, afflicted, prone to what?
To us, as if obscurely hopes or harms

can come to it, as if it walks the street
in love, abashed, abused, as if it, too
expands to wonder at the point of it,

contracts to desperation in the blue
morning, helplessly expands anew.