build eternity into a poem

[David Wojahn says this was written on the back of an envelope by the poet Larry Levis, so I've tried to lay it out in that way, and the punctuation is based on my hearing Wojahn read these words.]

I think I might build eternity
into a poem one brick, one
brush of the pen at a time.
An argument against one
contradiction or the next,
until it stares out like the
sphinx past everyone but me.
After all I wrote it. I'm
forty-seven. My mind,
my thought, have never felt
so passionate, so shapely,
or as free of ideologies.
Poetry underwrites
consideration of all else.
I am what made me. I am not.

—Larry Levis, a statement read by David Wojahn in the documentary A Late Style of Fire