I cannot write about Seamus Heaney
found just months before his death
but whose influence informed my mentor
thus informing me.
Not unlike my great aunt, who I never knew,
who painted and sculpted and whose
art I have never seen, but it informed
my grandmother, my mother, and me.
There is nothing to say about how Sophocles
influenced Aristotle other than Plato
knew them both, and Plato probably used that
connection to sway his student.
And when I read of blackbirds and the poetry
of the Bog, I wonder how it affects
the marginalia and the order of words
and the outcome of this verse.
