seven poems

This poem is just like wall, but push it, and find its give. It is opening. As you push, it gives in. * This poem is absolutely quiet. In its making there were little scratches you might’ve heard as it moved away from the pen. But it got here, the place it made for, when the pen let it go, silence and more. * Word by word, comma, trope, this poem weaves a nest. From the stuff of its body it cushions the center for what will be born there. Here, within this poem a quickening, like the flutter of tongue against a concave palate. Like the light that comes in at the parting of the lips. Something inside this poem, if you believe it, will not die. And you needn’t believe it. You do not need to be here. The nest won’t have room for you, even curled up. Or in a cuckoo’s egg. Within the circumference of its nest the poem’s going about making. And here we are at the rim looking in. It’s not at all bothered, going about its business. But, really, it doesn’t mind being the center of attention, does it? I think, no. * If this were a poem you would feel your heart sitting up and listening, and, though it doesn’t understand words exactly, your heart would be attending to the voice, which sounds like your voice. Maybe that really is you, thinks the heart. Something must be going on. What? * This poem makes no effort to stir the emotions, hopes rather, that they will settle, as, at the bottom of the cup, there is the fine powder from the teabag, the tea cooling. * This is a poem because it hates poems. It wanted to get inside a poem and eat it from the inside until it replaced the poem’s material, until this, which hates, took over what place the poem made for itself, the space in thought, mouth, the page’s darkening. So, now, this wears the clothes of the poem, is stretched on the poem’s bed looking up at the poem’s light; and hates itself, a success. * This is the fourth poem I have written today. The poem did not arrive volunteer. Rather, it is a conscripted poem, dressed in an ill-fitting suit, looking sullen. And, of course, it wants to be somewhere else, poor thing. But this poem, the fourth I’ve written today and so something of an also-ran, waits to do its service. If it’s not ready, anyway, it’s here.