I was feeling like a pulled tooth,
thinking about my work and how no one would publish it.
Though I have not tried very hard to gain recognition,
my obscurity begins to be infuriating.
I sit on my couch reading Yeats,
recalling a story I read when I was much younger.
It tells of Yeats's anxious tears when he first learned
that his rousing verse had lifted peasants from the land
and inspired them to arms, that boys were dying with his words
on their lips- the first of all Ireland to kill a man with beauty.
His words evade me: it would seem to me that, Yeats being Yeats,
he'd have said something that I'd remember,
and like I said I read the passage a long time ago
so it's possible that the entire memory is fraudulent,
but goddamn to write a poem like that.
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