Where have you buried the poets?
their fine, slim cadavers
stacked neatly in the moonlight.
I saw them as we entered
but now they’ve vanished
and with them the risk
                           of rebel words
of revelry, and serious hauntings

Where have you buried the poets?
Was it deep in the gold mine,
in coffins made of lead
                          or other deadly metals?
Did you bury them in concrete
flooded by waters, pumped there to drown
                          their posthumous words
that tendency to sing like Orpheus
long after the fact
of each bureaucratic execution.

Where have you buried the poets?
Homer and Sappho, Ovid and Shakespeare,
Goethe and Dickinson, Eliot and Stein -
so many bodies in the mine shaft rotting -
Mallarme, Neruda, Zukofsky - silenced now
by men and women with
cardboard for brains
and hearts that never miss a beat.

Where did you bury them?
those
wizards, those
witches of the bleeding heart,
made momentarily visible
(in all its aching dignity)
against the stark backdrop of universe
where …?