PHOTO PROVIDED Joe Pacheco

Death is a free and easy metaphor:

Poets, like cowards, die a thousand times

For Beauty, Truth and Love Forevermore.

Quick exit language gets them through the door,

Collects an ode that’s owed them for their rhymes

As Death becomes their severance metaphor.

Their body of work in limited store

Remainders at last in “Last Selected Poems

On Beauty, Love and Truth and Nevermore.”

Eternity’s vast desert — one big bore:

Posterity is postered with worn-out names

Whose deaths were once the latest metaphor.

No Form and Content waging civil war

While villanelles vie with verse in mortal games

For Beauty, Love and Truth and Evermore.

Time and the river lap the endless shore,

Epiphanies wash out to unknown climes;

All Beauty, Truth, and Love are nothing more

Than Death as the ultimate metaphor.