The greatest poets were myths of poets,
Names attached to verses that, if composed
By mortal bodies with those names, were never,
By them, written down or, if written down by them,
Survive only in much later copies written down
Long after those bodies died. They waver,
Those ghostly poets, those ghost writers,
Authors of the nonexistent nations
Back of the many premodern traditions,
Behind the hagiographic scrims of lives
And explications, looking slightly mournful,
Faintly wise. Even their names, sometimes,
Are only notnames, and I would rather, without
Naming myself, not be the bearer of the name,
The famed, immortal poet’s name who did not
Compose all or most of those poems, but be
The remaining poems alone, the phrases I composited,
Composite of all the poems passed through me.
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