Poet's Choice

In the sharp declivities of the times they save their breath.

They are more put out by a misplaced tool or letter

Than birth or death.

And when they talk they talk to themselves; their rhetoric

Wanders off into privacies where a word

Cares not who hears it, and eloquence

Is a canard.

I know a mind, soul, whose time now leads it

Shoreward to silence.

Not long ago it chattered like half a school,

And bade the desert dance.

(Reed Whittemore's poems "On the Death of Someone Close" and "The Mind" can be found in his memoir, "Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet." Dryad. ¿ 2007 by Reed Whittemore.)