My Teacher

The summer they cut

the cancer out of your ear

you looked like Van Gogh:

white bandage, ginger beard,

pink face, blue shirt. But never

was any artist so sane as you. 

You are the man who builds

poems and houses: sound,

without charm, without artifice. 

There were tiny buddhas

in your office, carved elephants

on the windowsill. We 

came, and the poems 

came, and you spoke to them, 

kind and serious, and combed them

til they knew themselves. 

When we last spoke your beard was gone

and you seemed hale and well. 

T., how I need your strict look now, 

for I want to put my poems aside

like the girl in the old story who said

This needle is too heavy.