A man bigger than you and more intelligent
walks into his future as into a dining room
anticipating small surprises and large comforts.
He is the future.

A sleeve pinned to the uniform jacket
is said to flutter indicative of emptiness
not to mention the senselessness
of war, retribution, prosthetic tendencies
such as the poet's photographic blush
placed artistically thus—later they removed it
and restored the tintype to form, daguerreotype
to type, to be accurate, so to speak,
blushless and sepia. The extreme
of the known in the presence of the extreme
of the unknown. To any old philosopher
in cities such as Rome such ideas
as we amateurs derive are dreary:
empty sleeves fussily fluttering.

A man bigger than you and more intelligent
needed to see a hand-tinted world, a world
yellow and green. A man of passion,
as we say, as if there were another kind:
"How to convince you of the unknown
without resort to Art, Art
being what I least like in a timely world;
I wane to say it directly, as in 'escaped
alone to tell thee.' I wane to offer
delay, the extreme of the known blushing
on the sweet face of the Lady from Amherst."

The poem sometimes cries for explanation,
and the poem becomes the explanation
of its occasion. Which is boring.
And is a priori. After the fact, i.e.,
the poem must be among other things
the ding an sich, false phrase he overuses
because A it is foreign and thus one
must jump hurdles to get it, get to it,
and because B the idea of The Thing Itself
is the skeleton of the poem, The Poem:
to him it is anyway, as to her in Amherst.