Bel Canto Poem Rhyme Scheme

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The sun is high the seaside air is sharp	A
And salty light reveals the Mayan School	B
The Irish hope their names are on the harp	A
We see the sheep's advertisement for wool	C
Boulders are here to throw against a tarp	A
From which comes bursting forth a puzzled mule	B
Perceval seizes it and mounts it then	D
The blood dimmed tide recedes and then comes in again	D
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	-
Fateful connections that we make to things	E
Whose functioning's oblivious to our lives	F
How sidewise news of light from darkness springs	E
How blue bees buzz from big blooms back to hives	G
And make the honey while the queen bee sings	E
Leadbelly in arrangements by Burl Ives	G
How long ago I saw the misted pine trees	H
And hoped no matter how to get them into poetry	I
	-
	-
Stendhal at fifty gazing as it happened	J
On Rome from the Janiculum decided	K
That one way he could give his life a stipend	J
Was to suspend his being Amour's fighter	L
And get to know himself Here he had ripened	J
Accomplished loved and lived was a great writer	L
But never had explored in true detail	M
His childhood and his growing up So he set sail	M
	-
	-
Composing La Vie de Henry Brulard	J
But in five hundred pages scarcely got	J
Beyond his seventeenth year for it is hard	J
To take into account what happens here	N
And fit it all onto an index card	J
Even one moment of it is too hot	J
Complex and cannibalistically connected	J
To every other which is what might be expected	J
	-
	-
Sterne's hero has a greater problem never	L
Getting much past his birth I've had a third one	O
My autobiography if I should ever	L
Start out to write it quickly seems a burden	O
An I will do that the next time endeavor	L
Whatever life I do write's an absurd one	O
As if some crazy person with a knife	P
Cut up and made a jigsaw puzzle of a life	P
	-
	-
In any case a life that's hardly possible	Q
In the conditions that we really live in	R
Where easy flying leaps to inaccessible	Q
Mountainy places where love is a given	O
And misery if there infinitesimal	Q
Are quite the norm Here none by pain is driven	O
That is not curable by the romanza	H
That's kept in readiness to finish any stanza	H
	-
	-
Whatever then I see at this late stage of	S
My life I may or may not have stayed ignorant	J
Of that great book I've strained to write one page of	S
Yet always hoping my page was significant	J
Be it or not for me and for the ages	H
I leave it as it is Yet as a figurant	J
Who has not stopped I'm writing in addition	O
More lines to clarify my present disposition	O
	-
	-
One person in a million finds out something	T
Perhaps each fifty years and that is knowledge	U
Newton Copernicus Einstein are cunning	T
The rest of us just rise and go to college	V
With no more hope to come home with the bunting	T
Than a stray dachshund going through the village	U
However what a treat our small successes	H
Of present and of past at various addresses	H
	-
	-
To be in all those places where I tarried	J
Too little or too late or bright and early	I
To love again the first woman I married	J
To marvel at such things as melancholy	I
Sophistication drums a baby carriage	V
A John Cage concert heard at Alice Tully	I
How my desire when young to be a poet	J
Made me attentive and oblivious every moment	J
	-
	-
Do you remember Oceanview the Fair	W
The heights above the river The canoes	H
The place we beached them and the grass was bare	W
Those days the sandbars gave our knees a truce	H
The crooked line of pantry shelves with pear	W
And cherry jam And Pancho with his noose	H
Do you remember Full and Half and Empty	I
Do you remember sorrow standing in the entry	I
	-
	-
Do you remember thought and talking plainly	I
Michel and I went walking after Chartres	H
Cathedral had engaged our spirits mainly	I
By giving us an insight into Barthes	H
Michel said he was capable of feigning	T
Renewed intentions of the soul's deep part	J
Like this cathedral's artificial forces	H
That press a kind of artless thought into our faces	H
	-
	-
And yet The moor is dark beneath the moon	X
The porcupine turns over on its belly	I
And new conceptions rap at the cocoon	X
Civilization dealing with us fairly	I
For once releases its Erectheion	X
Of understanding which consoles us nearly	I
Later we study certain characteristics	H
That may give us a better chance with the statistics	H
	-
	-
How much I'd like to live the whole thing over	L
But making some corrections as I go	Y
To be a better husband and a father	L
Be with my babies on a sled in snow	Y
By twenty I'd have understood my mother	L
And by compassion found a way to know	Y
What separates the what I started out as	H
From what I sometimes wished I was when in the mountains	H
	-
	-
To be once more the one who what was worthy	I
Of courtship courted it was quite as stressful	Q
As trying to er as they say give birth to	J
A poem and as often unsuccessful	Q
But it was nice to be sublime and flirty	J
With radiant girls and in some strange way restful	Q
I could be everything I wasn't usually	I
And then to get somebody else to feel it mutually	I
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	-
In poems the same problem or a similar	L
Desire of course not only to do old things	H
But things unheard of yet by nuns or visitors	H
And of the melancholy finch be co finch	Z
In singing songs with such a broad parameter	L
That seamstresses would stare forget to sew things	H
Astronauts quit the sky athletes the stadium	A2
To hear them and the rest of what they hear be tedium	A2
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	-
Such wild desires I think it's recognizable	Q
Are part and parcel of the Human Image	U
And in a way I'd say no less predictable	Q
Than Popeye's feelings for a can of spinach	B2
Yet if we're set on course by the Invisible	Q
All pre determined what about the language	U
That teases me each morning with its leanings	H
Toward the Unprogrammed Altitudes beyond its meanings	H
	-
	-
Are you O particles O atoms nominatives	H
Like Percevals and Stendhals set in motion	X
By some Ordaining Will that is definitive	C2
Is this invading chill and high emotion	X
This tendency to know one is regenerative	C2
Is this all tidal take home like the ocean	X
Be what you may my thanks for your society	I
Through the long life I've had your jokes and your variety	I
	-
	-
The warmth you've shown in giving me a temperature	L
That I can live with and the strength you've shared with me	I
In arms and legs and for your part in literature	L
What can I say It is as if life stared at me	I
And kissed my lips and left it as a signature	L
Thank you for that and thank you for preparing me	I
For love itself and friendship its co agent	J
Thank you for being this and for its inspiration	X

Kenneth Koch

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