CRY ALOUD

Watching "David and Lisa"
in an all night movie theater
from an ice glittering evening
outside Manhattan
when teaching a late spring
course which surprised me
in a cry aloud in the balcony
reaching to hear out
to a patron so effected  by the film
after a semester of human voices
from those ephemeral days
meeting live-in poetic souls
who still clench my hand
in a pastoral setting
of the late Sixties
thinking of those readers
whose images of mortal clay
in spent time of selected anguish
like John Clare
or Sylvia Plath or Bill Styron
wishing for a time
to be isolated from their public
in an asylum of the suffering
with an endless tongue
rolling on their mouths
of unfinished brilliance
from wise trembling lips
of assorted medications
seeking to express
from the class stupor
of bloodshot eyes
meeting those students
with the retention of genius
as regents to reign over words
and constituents for us,
they taught me.