The Effacement of Poets
A poem by Royal Rhodes

The Effacement of Poets
   ~ after Colm Toibin on Bishop and Gunn

Two poets who were later friends kept readers
distant; each built worlds they only viewed,
while other poets opened up — the bleeders —
confessing faults and traumas, fate-pursued.
But these who lived uneasy helplessness
clung to control with deep fastidiousness.

They used an oddly plain poetic diction,
despite immense formality created
in the endings. Closure was a fiction
in which regret had never quite abated.
For closure to be possible in strange
surreal poems, no logic could arrange.

Both were partly raised by spinster aunts,
in houses where they never felt at home,
amidst the labyrinths of childhood taunts.
It was not home they left to learn to roam.
Each found their place on oceans near to hills
in cities that exotic beauty fills.

They did not tell their private lives, and thought
each other’s writing limited — not deeper —
and yet displaying dazzling powers, fraught
with melancholy, waltzing with the Reaper.
Then her landscape poem he came across
described  by her, not home — a place of loss.

How we live — a place of loss — to name
would be betrayal, so she said “Not much”–
calculated words, but not the same
as nothing — almost nothing — silence such
as disappears in commas fencing words
that end with water, elms, and speechless birds.

And he recalling Caravaggio’s
shadowed canvas of St. Paul’s conversion,
viewed in Santa Maria del Popolo,
wrote as a watcher of the eye’s inversion.
He saw the poor close praying with a kiss:
“Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.”

Two poets ended poems with dying falls
of syllables, with “nothingness” and “geese”,
so we, made sad that something deeper calls
we understand but half and must release
illusions of control, are filled with sighs
to watch instead the silent, star-filled skies.

About the Author:

Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who taught for almost forty years. His poems have appeared in various literary journals, including: DREICH, The Seventh Quarry, Lothlorien Poetry, Allegro, Ekphrastic Review Challenge, and The Montreal Review, among others.

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