The Attic

We have ascended to this paradise,
Make-believe angels hurrying to our choirs.
Imagination is our Sunday vice;
We are alone, alone with our desires.

We are enchanted by the sound of rain;
Darkness, half-light, and light combine and blur.
This is the national treasury of Cockaigne,
Of which we are the keepers, as it were.

Henri Coulette at Poetry Foundation

I think that our job is to write poems. And it's a terrible temptation,
if you can read them well, to want to go out and read them because that
is a very interesting performance, and can be a moving thing. But that
is not the essential job. I think that we all got too caught up in dealing
with that business, of being performers and having careers. We should
have been better to each other.

No one would choose to have the pulped remains of an important book as his escutcheon. Yet it seems hauntingly appropriate for Coulette, a poet of messages not received, or secret agents and secret agendas, whose words spoke under the radar screen of their time, but clearly and with emotional precision.