“For Three years out of key with his time”

There was a time I thought that a poem could
Be done & not abandoned, finished not
Just left inside a file cabinet
Like an old tax return, the debt
Outstanding, lingering, a time I thought
By other than some arbitrary date
Or cut off point, like death, a poem might
Be dotted with a period, complete.
No more. To finish is impossible.

No wonder Horace
Wished that the bards of the future would hold
Their verses back.

Persuade by way of mastery, 
Wait nine years to know what’s good 
Another thing entirely,
Routine dislodged.

No wonder Horace, having lived through
Civil War, a witness to the worst,
Would advocate no ultimatum,
Rather, let the seasons come
And go & bear the verses out. They won’t
Have been unworthy patience nine
Years down the road, unforced, no doubt.

No wonder Horace, who with his own eyes
Had seen the bloody aftermath, when both
Of those involved have been reduced by half,
Their finest ranks in maudlin rags, the filth
Of rotten flesh, no wonder he
Would rather not allow himself
To get excited by what seems unprecedented.
Look for the enduring principle.
 
No wonder Horace, who wasn’t born of wealth,
Would look for healthy ways to live, that is
Avoid the violence, his lines not for
Achilles, no.

If you should hope to wear
The laurels clipped from higher blooms equipped
With nothing but the verse beneath your soles,
I offer my condolences. The rooms
You dream of cost a fortune not in cash
But chronic shortages, no secret stash
For rainy days, in old age poverty,
Perhaps no more in print, no more in stacks,
Carted to the annex, not checked out
In decades, scores, a century or more,
Abandoned, out of fashion, burned.

His subtlety with metric feet
Is still renowned, exemplary,
More permanent than Rome’s concrete.
Roman forum, old decorum,
Criticisms last through schools.

There lurk as yet within the lines he loves
The flaws he’s still too close to recognize,
As when through fog at dawn you find your eyes
Are blurry, can’t discern what’s at a distance.