Poet Hunting

sometimes I go poet hunting
which is not a reference
to idle Sunday mornings spent
searching for titles in the basement
room of a second-hand bookshop
rather I hunt poets
the way one might a large mammal
each unique, but plentiful
enough that one would not
be missed if captured
I want to catch
the poet’s essence, that part
that can be trapped in words, perhaps,
but nothing else
that part to which each stanza is a cell;
each line, a bar
neither the solitude
nor the confinement concerns him
the jail room is the same scriptorium
where Wilde wrote the verses of a ballad;
and the detainment camp, dark in snow,
the same stage where Litten
recited Thoughts Are Free
at times I seek the poet actively
through the shady hill-countries of the mind,
over and between sunspots of allusion
and pools as deep as secrecy
and sometimes I strap
that heavy carbine of analysis to my back
and follow the markings of the black
ink across the arctic page
like a telling spoor in the white
and naked earth
but mostly
I simply set a trap
I bait my heart with praise
and Rumi comes
a wheeling musk deer; coat lined
with the scent of paradise
I bait my heart with absurd pain
Bukowski stalks in, a white,
cross-eyed, tailless cat; full of the strange
wisdom of things breaking, and not broken
I bait my heart with pride whatever comes
I see Lucille Clifton; her large eye-glasses
and her twelve fingered hands: coaxing me
daring me to celebrate
I bait my heart with death
and Goethe arrives as a butterfly
with resurrection
and Eleanor Ross Taylor travels through me
on her musty old mare, back to a clean beginning;
to her parents’ kitchen in the country
bait your heart with what you will
there are poets with every appetite
and once they enter, that trap that is the heart,
there is no chance of parting
for the one who came;
for the one who beckoned