the impetus possessed me at 13,
alighting apparitionally, as far as I know,
as it did to Neruda, in the guise of an
invisible angel named Poetry, and if
that is not the case,
I can only speculate that it was
greeting cards and mother goose,
party games and rock ‘n roll,
Louisa May Alcott and The Brothers Grimm,
Whoever wrote the Hardy Boys’ Mysteries…

To the very best
Of my recollection, it was not my parents
(nudie mags and porn in the bathroom,
scandal sheets and "True Romance" by the bed).
Not church, not the bible; we were
The secular kids of battling, besotted parents,
Who read newspapers and Harold Robbins paperbacks,
Not poems - never poems.

Of four children in the home, dozens
In the neighborhood, it seemed
I was the only one Poetry chose.
Once seized, I scribbled profusely,
Carefully always rhyming for at least two years –
Then high school: my first admission
into the world of words.

That was where I found her, the first genius beacon
who spoke just to me, only for me, although she
was dead already, by her own brilliant hand.
Introduced to me by a blurb in a magazine,
Followed by a fictionalized autobiography, then, Ariel.
She is known familiarly to me by one name,
Special, unique: She is Sylvia.
What did Sylvia do for me (Other than write
The most Amazing Poetry I had ever seen)?

Learn to work it, that was one.
Begin to breathe it, to see it
In the commonplace: the slice of an onion,
The desertion of a wife, the fetching sounds that babies make.
Years later autodidactically
I absorbed her poems, her journals, her biography
so thoroughly that when I read
"The Collected Poems," I did so aloud, with a
British accent. And very nearly believed for a time,
That what kept me alive past the age of 30
Was the child I had at 20,
Because he seemed to be the only thing
Between Sylvia and me that defied correlation.

Admonished by Sylvia I returned to school,
To undertake a formal study of Poetry.
Device, structure, imagery,
Evolution of form preceding history,
Zietgiests the Willies Prufrock and Pound,
Lowell, Roethke, "The Waking."
Conventions falling like leaves yet never losing their green…

Awestruck and anxious I began to believe
In my own power of prophecy, started to think
That Poetry had not been mistaken when it chose me.
And while I could not and would not be Sylvia,
I actually might, eventually, achieve the marriage
Of talented art and sweaty craft, successfully
Enough to say earnestly and unpretentiously,
"I am a poet." She did not do it single-handedly,
but this is what Sylvia did for me.