Go, little book. If anybody asks Why I add poems to a time like this, Tell how the comeliness I can't take in Of ships and other figures of content Compels me still until I give them names; And how I give them names impatiently, As who should pull up roses by the roots That keep him turning on his empty bed, The smell intolerable and thick with loss.
Reprinted from Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems by William Meredith, published by Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 1997. Copyright (c) 1997 by William Meredith. All rights reserved; used by permission of Northwestern University Press and the author.