Accomplished fingers begin to play
–W. B. Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli”

Yeats was okay with social disparity
The artist here a serving-man
Roughly of a piece with plum or cherry-branch
Sweetening the task of climbing to the heights
Providing genteel accompaniment
Adding décor to the work of aristocracy

Heaney was great with one-syllable words
Slub and rump and a tobacco plug
Milton wrote English as if it were his second language
A guilty person is nocent
A river wanders with mazy error
Homicide serves as an epithet

Verbal terra incognita exerts an irresistible attraction
I am drawn to little-known words I can’t help it
And to display these arcane specimens I know is affectation
But then poetry is affectation innit
It’s not as if poems are natural objects
Waiting to be discovered

And so we need an agricultural not a geographical metaphor
And although agriculture was a catastrophe
Voyages of discovery were worse
Nevertheless writing like other skills requires cultivation
And a collection is sometimes called a garland of flowers
To be found not in a colony but in a garden

Prelapsarian Adam feared his cropland too fecund
And hence proposed marital separation
Rappaccini’s horticulture proved fatal at the last
And nobles executed poachers in their parks
I specialize in the rare the decorative and the easily grown
Wormwood dark cereus and sickly orchids

Truth in the world of objects is available to everyone
Theoretically and to the extent that it is known
But the inner world requires expression
And must be coaxed into being
Experience transmuted into words
As the farmer beguiles the yielding earth