INFLUENCES

A student asked me
who influenced my poetry

I told him I was partial
to the Roman Martial

At ten I read John Very
telling me of the heavenly

then at a loss for the blinded
Puritan poet Milton

with his aerial quality
and angelic in sight,

and the visionary
St.John of the Cross

who loved night
absolutely

then at eleven I turned
to New York school

O 'Hara, Schuler, Ashbery's
enlightened symmetry,

I  thought along the white pages
of their language's chemistry,

then read in not so easy French
Rimbaud and Artaud on a bench

and yearned and was taught
from the ear of Pound and Eliot

I sought to be modern
and fed on W.H. Auden,

My time runs by its pace
of a quotidian Phil Larkin

by a sphere
of meridian place,

enjoying James Merrill
in his vetted Divine Comedies

the word games of Hopkins,
a man of the cloth

hid the Asian translations
of Kenneth Rexroth,

then of course the new Scottish
force of Hugh MacDiarmid,

when with my own arrow and bow
had my target set on Vallejo

yet not knowing all mystery
in a translations history,

a secret spot on a patriarch's path
met Sexton and Sylvia Plath.