Trust me, I’ve tried to clone you in the measured
Bone and flesh of poems. It never works.
Parading lives of metric pain and pleasure
Coalesce, until a vague soul lurks
Behind the fragrant adjectives of clay,
Extending into silence, and the art
Invokes your symmetry. If I could say
The sentence at the center of your heart,
I’d name new worlds. Instead, I pile pearls,
Oyster-like, around the sharp details
Of your organic fact; each phrase unfurls
Beneath you, and the simulacrum fails.
All poems are pale impostors of your eyes,
Beside whose truth all words are senseless lies.