WCW’s Valentine

Prose began as simple commentary
on the pre-existing conditions
in which the soul could speak
to the dead the trees the waves
all it had itself called forth
while day after day the old sages
wrote down the praise-songs
that came to them hurriedly
because the gods would soon be gone
leaving behind their forests of art
their old settlements and failing farms
poetry began as all we could remember
of the long talks of their last nights
about the kind of imaginations we would need
to perceive the new poetry when it returned