by Sam Markewich

My Dear Poets,
Though you may not have heard,
Wallace Stevens is dead, died years ago.
So too are William Blake and Wadsworth Longfellow.
Dylan Thomas as well as the Shakespearean Sonnet, the English language
(which Jabberwocky did not revive).
And the image alone cannot imagine its way past its own imagined imagination.
The allit-irrational sentiments of home are not like anything so pleasant
as you say. Nor do they stink, fester, or rise up to touch Your
pen has been outmoded by its ink.
These are dead as history. Reified, not rigormortissed.
Their ashes have been blown over your pages. And the plums that he ate now decay on our tongue.