You want meaning, drummer-boy? Try to figure it out.

 5
  
 Cornered in a crossweave   of very pianissimo
 scales   tumbling down terraces   I learned
 a lot from him   I learned little things
 that mean so much in music   get the little
  
 things together   the way you build a house
 and then the whole structure will stand up
 get the patient on her feet and   Presto
 dancing the minimum   the minutest
  
 waltzing bee   across a waft so fa so fine
 handwoven llama threads   all manual
 cowpuncho Nilon Ship's Clothing   the map
 a tiny honey palm-lamp now   within a fable
  
 of the feeblest roost   or nest   beneath a
 river of Egyptian stars   one lone nut
 (almond, acorn) tunneled in the rivulet
 of a silky   milky   nebulae blanket
  
 and sheets of big muddy   scarab sound
 or terraces of rainbows  out of the cosmos
 of her sorrow   44 stitches to the cinch
 of a single googol [coined by a child]
  
 squared off on a grid of linked unchains
 twirling toward mid-April   Washington
 or Lafayette   leftover in a Thursday rain
 vale, Jo   it's a map of...   from a distance
  
 shielded   ink kenosi-shrouded crossroad
 or galaxy of frailest   grassblown wind
 a quantum myrrh held   in a widow-
 pain   a   microscopic   dust sirocco
  
 gleams there   dead ahead and   green
 kayak in a rocket in a yippie eye O kayak
 pi A-grid a-wool manually-done and   a.k.a.
 Mplmnde. Mojómemo Lt. Col. Greenègresham
     
                                    1.22.2000

Examples of perfect, "seraphic" poets : Holderlin, Pushkin, Marvell, Keats, Donne, Rilke, Celan, Mandelstam, Whitman, Dickinson...

what makes them perfect? At their best, they make verse sing on all levels. Intellectual music. Going to the edge of the human (the upper limit).

Mystery of when & how nations & cultures evolve perfect poets. Dialect of the tribe; shared meanings & forms of play.

It might be easier to understand what I was trying to get at yesterday, with my rubrics about poetry's transcendental perfection, if we think of such a characteristic as analogous to what music is & does.

I don't want to think of music "inhabiting" poetry, translating it into an unknown beautiful dream-speech (symbolism). I want to think of the harmony of poetry as sui generis, as applying its own peculiar powers & methods; but that the beauty expressed in painting & music is evidence of analogous forms of harmony.

I think of poetry's harmony as global, manifest in all languages. Global, yet strict. Something different from Ron Silliman's or Josh Corey's "post-avant community".

The strictness I'm talking about has to do with beauty's inherent qualities, which, in poetry, encompass the objects of both sense & intellect, and have to comprehend all the human & natural constructions which make up tradition - going back to the origins of language on the one hand, and the origins of the universe on the other.