Letter April 22nd

I thought I’d write a letter, by way of introduction,
To thank you for your greetings, interest, and convey my pleasure
At a sympathetic mind (though as for your body, well, we’ll see in time).

Hannibal once fell on Rome, they say, with thrice a dozen elephants:
This is something like the weight of duties, papers, books
That I have presently incurred. Weekends I work libraries
(Where I am writing presently) and clean the puke, blood,
And beer from off the SU’s walls and floors. When I’m not stacking
I read volumes – Das Kapital des Kulturs (not by Marx,
Of newer and more English fame, in fact a canon whose sole aim:
The recent Culture Wars), Virgil’s Georgica, the Preludes,
Several idle compilations, butter-flying fancies, meditations
On The End (I’ll only give a hint, a German author who laments
A vile and Germanic war – not Aristotle, nor
Some fancy Stoic art, Chryssipus, Alexander, or one of those
Precocious modern upstarts who sing of accidents or incidentals
– I prefer philosophy, like my breakfasts, continental).
I write poetry, too, the fruits of which I serve before you
Gen’rously, and whether they be fresh or rotten
I supply abundantly; Horace of old, and I think Dante too
Composed their epistles in bold measure (ancients had the leisure
To take careful count of words), and so it feels appropriate
To scratch out thoughts adorned at least (though they be in all else
Scattered nothing, dense, obtuse) in golden rhymes. For dithyrambs
I have a lyre or winsome silver flute with which I play
My praise in Echo’s halls. Occasionally, as tempers fall,
I while away an hour with a friend, or dip and bend
Beneath a disco’s lights. There I yearn for bodies
Slim and crowned in double sunsets narrowing to muddy,
Drunken cogitations. I dream of orgies, or betimes
A hand or arm, a frame to which my lithely form might bind
As round an oak the ivy raps, rewraps, thence to drink the sap
Of flowing love. But these thoughts succeed
As swiftly as a cloud, some sun-pierced cirrus of an azure day
Departs the sky. Now you have something,
A too deranged and formal aspect of my thought; I bid you well,
And leave you with this half-formed, broken thing I’ve wrought.