For Srinivas Rayaprol
by Hoshang Merchant We spoke to the same Master -- Pound and Williams And with their masterplans You built your house of poems Elegant as bridges / cunning engineer Of mystic arches, subtle chemistry Your fathers fixed the grammars Of your tongues You soared with the flight of words Those to come after you Had the blueprint of birdflight But they build you a mausoleum Brick by brick So that your poems can sleep In dusty library As our women do in uneasy beds Out of breath... A poet too can run out of breath But never out of words To do so would indeed be death And cunning geometry! Poets also only dwell on earth.