The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Michael J. Whelan

Ars Poetica:
            Annunciation

That scrawny cry – It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir

            "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself"
                                                                         Wallace Stevens

Sometimes

below my lamp before my pen

is put to pad they
come

a procession of C’s
a solo O long lost

an N escaped
from send

an acolyte I

utterances
from the deep

that know no
ground

seeking to conceive
their own conception

hovering

over my empty
            page

like the Spirit

over the stunned
            Virgin.