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glass
    of the museum case,
    I’d shrink myself to fit
    in that empty chair and put
    those glasses on—whereby
    I’d know whatever it was
    I needed to magnify.

CRUSOE’S FOOTPRINT
    At last he lays his head flat upon the ground, close to my foot, and sets my other foot upon his head, as he had done before; and after this made all the signs to me of subjection, servitude, and submission imaginable, to let me know how he would serve me so long as he lived.
                             — DANIEL DEFOE , Robinson Crusoe
    The poet who writes “free” verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself.
                                            — W. H. AUDEN
    And Elizabeth Bishop did it, in her “Crusoe
    in England”: though she needn’t have scanned a foot
    in writing it, every step was itself alone
    and demanded whatever served. Sometimes she cast
    her thought in sestinas; found at her typewriter keys
    to set free memories otherwise confined,
    or labored within a villanelle to find
    lost houses, continents, like the geometer Crusoe,
    whose world to map had no scale and no keys;
    who saw the surf wash in, efface his foot-
    print like a sandpiper’s. The melted cast-
    les of sand we’ve made are in the end all one:
    what company we have when we feel alone!
    A solitary stroll on the beach to find
    ourselves rewards us, largely due to the cast
    supporting us from the wings, the backstage crew so
    handy, the believable props, and the foot-
    lights revealing the beaming spectators: keys
    to our happiness, in which the fashionable quais
    Auden wrote of slosh with talk about us alone.
    We’re not, in fact, entirely sorry for the foot-
    note-in-mouth disease of the critics who find
    what was never there in two-dimensional Crusoe.
    Surely he would have liked to attend the cast-
    away party that followed him—the downcast,
    austere “Robinson” poems of Weldon Kees
    the suicide, or Émile by that crank Rousseau,
    who thought he’d bring up a boy on Defoe alone.
    Swiss Family Robinson ? There: we’ve defined
    the branching tree-house of writing. Friday’s foot
    is at his master’s head, and at the poet’s foot
    the subject’s breathing: admittedly these are caste
    systems, and guilty as charged, we the jury find.
    No man is an island; we’re more like the Florida Keys—
    a stanza of lines that each began alone.
    Whoever free-floats, it isn’t versatile Crusoe,
    who cast his dreams with people he hoped to find,
    and through years without lackeys, never slept alone
    given the draft at his foot, his Robinson Crusoe.

LOST ORIGINALS
    All his life he spoke of “lost originals,” as if he were reaching beyond his own civilization to the simplicity and grandeur of a remote past…
                             — PETER ACKROYD , Blake
    The window to the mortal world
    shows mountain islands in the sea.
    One of them rises at the same
    slope the soul floats from the body
    flat on the bed, in stony folds,
    the profiled head propped on a pillow.
    A second distant hill has curled
    into a corner of the window
    (more a mirror than a window)
    precisely in the size and shape
    of the other pillow at the foot
    of the bed from which, now flying up
    from feet of clay, utterly free,
    the female soul looks down on man,
    her weeping hair a kind of pity,
    her breasts as round as sun and moon.
    *
    For a pittance he would illustrate
    the poems of others, like The Grave
    by Robert Blair (forgotten now,
    of the graveyard school). He would engrave
    a scene like this to make ends meet,
    or sometimes furnish a first sketch
    for wretches like that Schiavonetti—
    who wrecked this one, and couldn’t etch—
    but beauty in the end was his,
    for right was left, and black was white,
    the world was flat and he went round
    his cottage blessed with second sight,
    like Catherine, his better half,
    and when the