for Joe
The poet sits at a small table
in this hometown restaurant.
Confident in his own territory
he selects poems from his early work
and opens his world to us all.
Sometimes he is the goldfish
and we the gawkers peer through glass.
Yet the image is clear
as the water he glides through
stroking each poem with ease.
Sometimes he is the bumblebee
wrapped in the flower’s closing
locked into love’s last bloom
as winter stills the world of bees.
But song transcends the season.
His singing swims and buzzes
over and around and through us all
with murmurs of Dickinson and McEwen,
of Yeats and Pound, and those
who have touched his tongue.
Closer and closer we are drawn
into this nectared world of words
and sounds that dip and flutter
through the glass and petals of language
and into the world that is his poem.
Toronto, September 1982