Old Temples in Moonlight

Eliot's assertion that he has shored fragments against his ruins still echoes here in the poems of Old Temples by Moonlight, though that assertion has itself now been sufficiently fragmented and possibly too often shored in the massive shoring project of a time when it seems we make our beds among fragments of fragments and fondly trust that the electricity in our devices will be a sufficient sustainer of our lives, our work, and our half-frantic, half-lethargic poems, in which we combat the monsters of wisdom, rage, and apathy, looking toward the shadows of the Parthenon and those of Chichén Itzá and dreaming of rivers, the Rio Bravo and the Nile, the Alapaha and the Mississippi, those potent and immortal washers-away of our sins, praying in faith and hope and love, praying for many things, throwing in prayers to be free of our own complaints and our own incapacities and our own gross lapses of kindness. One's poems are one's life, and hope persists that one's life is connected to the lives of others, though perhaps not necessarily to Eliot's.