The Poet's Mirror by Lloyd Jacobs

​The Poet’s Mirror I                                                                         
                                                                                                   
Spirits assail under cover of dark
     to suborn the poet’s ink

how close are prayer and poetizing
     wrestling the ineffable

the half-finished poem is a blind man feeling 
     his way on a dark night

or a lover groping with passionate hands
     toward his consort’s bed

how the autonomous words
     blow where they list

the bell of the Sorbonne, the guttered candle
     the frozen inkpot

warn against the Promethean stroke
     which re-orders the world 



The Poet’s Mirror II

The poet indites his hope
     of immortality
          in evanescent tracery

of loneliness, love and loss;
     concupiscence and copulation
          synecdoche for life itself.   


Lloyd Jacobs is a former surgeon and university president, now writing daily. His poetry has been published in The Wallace Stevens Journal and The Main Street Rag as well as by other small magazines.