We clamor for masterpieces to burn, desperate
to send up into air the ash of Racine or the Bard
to rain down as prose on those still listening.

But I needed to talk concerning those works one reads
endlessly over the dead, those slowly turned pages,
half hope, half hubris, to speak in favor of the classics,

of living up to them, as though one could rise on a wind
from a worded grave with the taste of cinders in the mouth.

No other way to make a life of ruminant memory, piecing out
uncertainty’s frightening ellipse, even as this condemns
the mind for a moment to the thoughts of others.

No other way, but to be awakened into another language,
to return to a voice haunted by unknowing, to the dead’s
unfilled fantasies of hope or love, to those words

capped now by finality, by a closure cutting off their
sounds and making an ashen sky look wider and richer.