These are some of the poems I read today: The William Carlos Williams
about dancing naked in front of the mirror. The Pedro Pietri about calling in
sick for work. The Rachel Zucker about cutting up mushrooms or radishes.
The Ada Limón with the raincoat. I read a Willie Perdomo poem
with a disco ball in it. A Larry Levis about having sex
the day after Kent State. In the Perdomo, it says Bienvenido and it truly did
make me feel welcomed. Neither the mushrooms nor the radishes made me feel
anything. Ditto for dancing naked. Or just dancing. Or being naked. Or grabbing
something piercy to pierce my naked skin while watching intently.
Kent State, I think, was a confrontation between young people and police
at a university in the sixties. Or rather, that’s where the confrontation took place.
It’s not something to call anybody about now. Still, I want to. It happens
that I run in to put on my raincoat and by the time I step back out, whatever
was going on with the sky has stopped and everybody left — I secretly love that.
/ / / / /
I went to the museum and stood staring at a chicken
as drawn, pencil to paper. Afterwards, I stood on the street
and stared, hands in my pockets, at a couple sitting on a bench.
When that didn’t work, I did the chicken dance.
Then I sat reading a book about the women who clean
other people’s houses, written by one of the women
homeowners. I thought about how the world is divided
between the books you start to read and the ones you don’t.
The world is not divided in this way. In this way, the world
is depressing, depending on how much of what you have
to clean might belong to others staring at you
so they can write about it. In the museum, aside from the chicken,
I noticed a woman with a mop mopping after me.
She did not ask, or agree, to be put here. Here she is.
/ / / / /
If only the cute nannies at the park would trade glances with me.
Would you look at them sitting with other people’s children,
Would you look at me sitting with other people’s poetry. It’s like
we’re meant to be. I can see it in their faces: they’ve already grown tired
of the wonder that is a little living thing. They can’t look away though,
without putting their jobs in jeopardy. I wonder what it is I think I risk if I turn away
from poetry. I wonder what things I’ve turned away from on account of poetry.
Mostly I wonder what my children are doing and who’s looking after them. Is she cute?
Would she accept a poem in exchange for letting me sit with my kids under the afternoon sun?
There’s a poem in there somewhere is what poets say in the face of most
any life circumstance. What they mean is that they don’t know what to say.
Like when you must explain to a stranger in a car why you’re standing in the middle
of a parking space while your friend circles back again around the block. You
raise your hands sort of dumbfounded and hope against hope that they take it.
/ / / / /
In Alice Notley’s poem “I must have called and so he comes,”
the speaker has a conversation with Ted Berrigan’s ghost
about how good their marriage was and wasn’t.
This is an over-simplification, much like grief
is shorthand for there is a ghost or a ghoul
or a goblin in the kitchen and we’re hashing things out—
like whom we were to each other when each had skin easy
to the touch. I’m no stranger to listening
to my two little boys talk in their monster voice,
nor to treading lightly along the path of destruction
they leave in this house when they leave me in this house
they are not strangers in, but neither do they live here, as I am
prone to remind myself when being ghoulish with myself.