remain a poet
even when
they are
restless sleeping—
worlds apart
from any corpus
of notoriety,
let alone minutiae
of rhyme schemes
and feet—
even before
the raw seed
of The Idea
first perforates,
then warms in the loam
of their dream?
For even then,
in that darkness
before starlight
where no words exist,
when nothing
has been said,
is not a distinct
kind of fraught,
fecund emptiness—
some heartrending
insignificance—
made perfect-
ly manifest?