To Ligurinus, Relentlessly a Poet

You ask me, friend, why nobody wants to meet you?
Why your very approach empties auditoriums?
Why, wherever you go,
you’re the focus of a yawning wilderness?

Ligurine,
the reason’s plain: you’re much too much the poet.

That’s a disastrous thing to be, worse
than a tigress roused by the miaous of her kidnapped young,
worse than a sunstruck copperhead at noon,
worse than a hung-over scorpion.

Really, friend,
have you ever thought how much you ask of your public?

Let them be standing or sitting, you read them
your poetry. Let them run (not walk) for the exit, you
read them your poetry. The privy’s no refuge, for there
you are, and you read them your poetry.

When I go
to one of the public baths, your voice is round me
like a bursting sea. I dive into the pool,
and lo thou art with me, chanting. I’m late for dinner:
you make me a canto’s length later. I sit down to table,
you’re reciting under the table. And I’d go to bed,
but you’d jerk me awake with a sonnet sequence.

No.
You’re a kindly good man, Ligurine; but a calamity, too — a poet wagged by a tongue in perpetual motion.