Scott Cairns
January 2005

The Modern Poets


had first to supply as fitting complement
to the plow, the loft, the timid flock an urban
avatar or two, had first to raise the City’s
patent mediocrities to roughly Orphic
tenor, even such gross vehicles as Coupes DeVille
and Packards. They had thereafter to endow
with prophetic agency such proximate folk
as sausage vendors, the ubiquitous barkers
of burlesque, the jaundiced hacks. More delicate yet,
if they would succeed our moderns would need resist
as well the wince or smirk regarding all of the above
as lesser vestige of the bygone Bucolic scape.

In this, most would fail, albeit famously,
but a few—and you can probably name them—
would observed among the City’s earnest
indigenes and bright machinery an immanence
they would not greet embarrassed , but would esteem.
Upon the span, the tug, among the legion
mazing passages and thriving scenes, these
would entertain a vivid host of angels,
if not quite unawares, would receive as dew the kiss
of sleet, as the murmur of bees the hived drone
of the rain wet El, as incense an idling exhaust.

From Philokalia: New & Selected Poems (Zoo Press, 2002).