Yearly Archives: 2023

63 posts

Snapshot-in-Time Poems: A Mix of Concrete, Abstract, and Economy

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For a successful poem, sometimes a snapshot in time is all it takes. You don’t even need to get into narrative beginnings, middles, and ends, because your poem is that brief, almost like something you’d drive by, briefly take in, and draw your own conclusions about.

In a way, writing about a brief moment in time is akin to ekphrastic poetry. Recalling the picture from memory hits you emotionally, so you ask yourself, “Why?” Answering that “why” is the trick.

For starters, the first line has to jump right in. No needless exposition, thank you. No clearing of the throat before you get to the important stuff. This is a snapshot in time, after all. Just get to it.

Then, the necessary details. The descriptive elements you have taken the time to trace to your own emotions. Concrete is always the driver of abstract, after all, but connecting the dots requires both honesty and careful thought. It also requires deletion of superfluous elements as you revise your work.

Here, in Joseph Mills’ poem, the opening line provides essential information to the meaning of the last. That’s economy. It also bridges the man’s situation—a wife with a terminal illness in the hospital—with the snapshot described—a quick game of catch with the fatherless boy next door.

Keep your eye on the tennis ball they’re tossing, though. It’s more than a tennis ball, and because it’s more than a tennis ball, it’s a poem. A successful snapshot-in-time poem.

 

Catch
Joseph Mills

She’s been in the hospital a week,
this time with no improvement,
and I’ve come home to shower,
change clothes, and feed the dog.
As I’m about to get back in the car,
the boy next door, whose dad left
years ago, asks if I’ll play catch,
and I agree because it’s something
I can do. We toss a tennis ball
back and forth in the driveway;
after awhile his mother comes out
with two beers and a juicebox.
She watches, without speaking,
because we have known each other
a long time, and, as it gets darker,
the ball seems to become lighter,
floating through the gloaming.
Maybe I should say it looks
meaningful, like a radioisotope
or a pill, but I’m not thinking
anything like that or about how
we probably look like a family
to passersby. I’m not thinking
at all. I’m just swinging my arm,
grabbing and releasing yellow,
slowly becoming indistinct.

Spinning Gold with Navel Lint

poetry writing writing inspiration

kowit

There’s no shortage of “poet’s workshop” books so, instead of buying new ones as they come out, I occasionally dip into old ones. After a few years between readings, the old becomes new, proving once again that the author of Ecclesiastes (“There is nothing new under the sun”) knew of what he spoke.

This week I’ve been poking around Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop. Portable workshops are good things for a guy who’s never attended a real one (hand in the air). Cheaper, too.

One chapter that caught my eye was the one called “Flying Into Oneself.” In an earlier chapter, “Awful Poems,” Kowit cautions against “navel-gazing,” or self-indulgent writing that really interests only you and yourself. But in “Flying Into Oneself,” he assures us that the navel-point-of-view can still work IF it takes its lint and weaves a creative cloak.

Ordinary (your world), meet surreal (an “out there” world), in other words.

As an example, and we all love examples, Kowit gives us David Ignatow’s poem “The Bagel.” You don’t get much more prosaic than a bagel. Ho-hum and pass the cream cheese. But Ignatow takes his self-indulgent, perhaps daily ritual of bagel-eating and takes it places the reader would not expect. Suddenly, self-indulgence gets off with a warning because reading police officers are intrigued by events. Witness:

 

“The Bagel” by David Ignatow

I stopped to pick up the bagel
rolling away in the wind,
annoyed with myself
for having dropped it
as if it were a portent.
Faster and faster it rolled,
with me running after it
bent low, gritting my teeth,
and I found myself doubled over
and rolling down the street
head over heels, one complete somersault
after another like a bagel
and strangely happy with myself.

 

If the prompt were to write a poem about dropping a bagel and a classroom of workshop students went to work, the results would be rather crumby. Yeah, you’d have variations on a theme: cream cheese, butter, jam, even lox, but overall, it wouldn’t get much further than the 5-second rule.

Ignatow’s example can be liberating for writers who think they lack for novel subjects. If you feel stymied by the quotidian obstinacy of everyday life, consider breathing new life into the ordinary. For starters, don’t restrict yourself. Forget the laws of physics. You’re not Isaac Newton. You’re a poet. If you want to have fun by somersaulting like a bagel chasing a bagel, be my guest. Readers will be happy to laugh at you, be charmed by you, cheer you, even.

Kowit sees some parallels between thinking like this and using dream imagery, but you don’t need a dream journal on your bedside table to engage. Day dreaming is much easier. And escapism via fanciful notions may just be the charge your “so what?” topics need.

Give it a go. Is it self-indulgent and ordinary? The answer’s no. It all depends upon the angle (and the spin)…

 

 

 

 

 

14 Rules for Writing from Tim O’Brien

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In Dad’s Maybe Book, author Tim O’Brien spells out some rules for writing intended for his sons, Tad and Timmy. They are equally intended for the reader, who is serving as a vicarious child of the O’Briens reading along.

Below are 14 Rules O’Brien shares, directly quoted from the book, and though he says “story” now and then, I daresay the advice works for poetry, novels, plays, and essays as well.

See if you agree:

 

1.  Review the difference between “lie” and “lay.” A good number of TV personalities, politicians, poets, recording artists, newspaper columnists, pediatricians, and crime writers should do the same.

2.  Do not be terrified of emotion. Be terrified of fraudulence.

3.  Stories are not puzzles. Puzzles are puzzles.

4.  Information is not story. Information is information.

5.  Pay close attention to the issue of simultaneity. In life, as in a good story, numerous things occur at the same time, even when your attention might be riveted on a rattlesnake coiled to strike. In other words, when you’re writing stories, do not juggle only a single ball. (Single ball jugglers rarely get hired twice to entertain at birthday parties.) Fill your stories with “nice contradictions between fact and fact.” Fill your stories with food and drink, the weather, tired feet, dental appointments, phone calls from out of the blue, upset stomachs, flat tires, pens that run out of ink, undelivered letters of apology, traffic jams, swollen bladders, and spilled coffee. These and other intrusions must be endlessly juggled as we make our way along the story lines of our lives. Therefore, don’t insulate your characters from the random clutter that distracts and infuriates and entertains all of us.

6.  Similarly, do not let excessive plotting ruin your story anymore than you would allow it to ruin your life.

7.  Bear in mind that stories appeal not only to the head, but also to the stomach, the back of the throat, the tear glands, the adrenal glands, the funny bone, the nape of the neck, the lungs, the blood, and the heart—the whole human being.

8.  You are writing not only for your contemporaries. You are writing also for a seventeen-year-old student who might encounter your story two hundred years from now, or for an old man in Denmark in the year 2420, or for a lonely widow sitting at a futuristic slot machine in the year 4620.

9.  Also, believe it or not, you are writing for those who have preceded you— for Thomas Jefferson, for the children of Auschwitz, and for a father who may no longer be present to read your story.

10.  Surprise yourself. You might then surprise your reader.

11.  Do not fear (or deny) your own ignorance. It makes for curiosity.

12.  Do not fear (or deny) ambiguity. Though the prose itself may be crystalline, good stories almost always involve people snagged up in confusing moral circumstances. Think of Raskolnikov. Think of Charles and Emma Bovary. Think of your dad.

13.  Pay attention to every word. There are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, plus a few punctuation marks. Those twenty-six letters, if poorly arranged, will result in mediocrity, infelicity, or plain gibberish. But from those same twenty-six letters, well arranged, come the sonnets of Shakespeare. The letters of the alphabet can be likened to the four chemical bases—adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine—that constitute the building blocks of all plant and animal DNA. The precise sequence, or order, of the bases determines whether an organism becomes a polar bear or a dachshund or William Shakespeare. Therefore, along the same lines, I suggest you do all you can to arrange the letters of the alphabet in exacting sequences.

14.  Read your writing aloud. Does it make sense? Does it make music?

The Pronoun “I” and Poetry

Ken Craft poetry updates on a free-verse life writing

i

Two cheers for the pronoun “I” in poetry! OK. One cheer, maybe? The upstanding pronoun has been under attack in some quarters because it seems to make poetry less universal to the reader and more of a diary delight exercise for the poet. But is it, really?

What’s terribly wrong when the “I’s” have it in poetry, anyway? Is it that difficult to identify with the author if it’s all about him or her? In prose, the opposite is true. First-person point of view, a standard from way back, is considered the most intimate, hail-fellow-well-met of all the POV’s and the surest ticket to winning readers over. In fact, after a while, the readers adopt the “I” as themselves. Writer becomes reader seamlessly!

So why should poetry be any different than prose? Is it because first-person poems are so overwhelmingly popular? Is it the hipster syndrome, wherein you rebel against anything the masses take to?

It should be pointed out, too, that “I” isn’t always as simple as it looks. Readers tend to assume the pronoun refers to the poet, but not necessarily. It of course can be a persona poem, wherein the “I” is actually a character of the poet’s imagination, the same kind readers are more used to seeing in novels and short stories. Thus, you would not refer to “the poet” in the poem, but “the speaker” in the poem.

That’s how beguiling the “I” is. It charms, it confuses, it leads you down unexpected turns once your assumptions are challenged.

Hey. My philosophy on poetry is big tent. Want the first-person point of view early and often? Be my guest. How about the present tense? If it works and makes your words more immediate, you have my blessing. A form poem? Very mathematical of you in a poetic way, but it’s a free country. I’ll be cheering from the free verse sidelines! “I” as yourself? It’s legal. As another “I”? Also within the parameters.

Maybe I’m laissez-faire about “I” because of this blog, an exercise in solipsism if ever there was one. Each of these posts is riddled with the pronoun “I.” Were I to count them in this entry, for instance, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were dozens.

That said, nothing surprises me anymore, including criticism of poor, innocent pronouns with backgrounds that are simply complex. In poetry, a prodigal “I” is cool.

As self-promotion, even studiously undercover, though? Less so. Your poetic license doesn’t cover marketing, but we all have to make a living—or, as they say in poetry circles, NOT make one. Thousands of people read my blog posts. Only the few and the proud have purchased my books.

Over and out, collective I-sorts!

 

***

 

The Only Tool Needed To “Get” Poetry

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why poetry

When I read it, Matthew Zapruder’s book, Why Poetry proved memorable. For instance, I give you Chapter 2, titled after the Marianne Moore quote about poets: “Literalists of the Imagination.”

The chapter title itself is poetic. It should be, as it’s taken from Moore’s famous poem, “Poetry,” which features “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Using Marianne as his inspiration, Moore or less, Zapruder begins to riff on layreaders and how so many of them shun poetry because they find it difficult or mysterious. In short, they throw up their hands because the meaning is hidden and wonder aloud why poets have to play hide-and-go-seek with their purpose, anyway.

The damage is done in school, chiefly (schools, after all, are the scapegoats for most all of our woes… remember Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos?). Darn those English teachers who constantly ask students to divine the meaning, the theme, the purpose, the symbolism, thus ruining a perfectly good poem. In Zapruder’s view, poems should be read for (brace yourselves) fun.

Of course, poems can’t be fun unless we know what the heck’s going on, so Zapruder recommends one essential tool to understand poetry: a dictionary. (You were expecting Siri or the dreaded Google search bar, maybe?)

“The portal to the strange is the literal,” he writes. Thus, as a teacher (most poets need full-time jobs, after all), he has students choose a word in the poem to investigate big-time, as in right down to its multiple meanings and history, or even, maybe, down to what it might have meant at the time that the poem was written.

Zapruder adds, “…the exercise of getting as deeply into the words as possible has the effect of showing them that this is the way into a poem, and that meaning and possibility come from that act, and not from some search for an interpretation someone else already made of the poem, that they have to figure out to get a good grade… It turns out that close attention to definitions and etymologies can be a portal to the power of poetry.”

From this paean to the literal’s eminence in an unexpected place — the genre of poetry — Zapruder goes on to say that many beginning writers of poetry get snared by the same misconceptions as layreaders. They purposely write in abstractions, mysteries, double meanings. They forsake the literal for the “deliberately obscure and esoteric.” It is, in short, a recipe for failure, just as reading poems strictly to interpret their coded language is a recipe for alienation.

Three cheers, then, for the literal and for taking poems at their word, both as readers and writers.

 

“A Silver Tear, A Tiny Flame”

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Every so often I poke around my copy of Li-Young Lee’s 1986 outing, Rose. The second poem in the collection — “The Gift” — is one of the more well-known ones. It showcases Lee’s knack for stylistic hybrids. The poem appears mostly narrative by nature, but there’s more to it, as the poem’s speaker pulls back from the story and looks down on it from the sky, if you will, giving the reader a bigger picture to play with. First, the poem:

 

“The Gift”
Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

 

The opening stanza sets up the poem by taking us into the past to a moment when the speaker’s father removes a splinter from his palm. The child’s perspective is emphasized with the words “he’d removed / the iron silver I thought I’d die from.”

The second stanza reflects on the moment. Using metaphor, the speaker recalls first his father’s voice and then his father’s hands — each key to the successful removal of the splinter.

Stanza three bends hypothetical. What if the reader were there at that moment? What if the reader followed the trajectory of that boy’s life, all the way to the moment when he is a married man bending over his wife’s right hand for a similar reason?

The fourth stanza echoes the first. The apprentice child is now a small hero looming large, too, like his father in that he repeats the same magical moment, offering the same small gift.

Then the negatives. Through contrast they sharpen the neighboring positive all the more. The speaker says:

 

I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.

 

Then the second negative wave: “And I did not lift up my wound and cry, / Death visited here!”

Followed by the positive: “I did what a child does / when he’s given something to keep. / I kissed my father.”

That something to keep is the gift, but it is not a physical one wrapped and bow-tied. It is a way, as Lao-Tzu might describe it. Something passed down but not held, evident but unseen, and warm as a pair of hands when they hold each other.

“Wagging My Feet Above the Abyss”

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Sometimes the image is everything, especially when it is an unexpected image, strange to the reader yet familiar—an oddly endearing combination.

A good example of poet conjuring a bit of what used to be called “magical realism” is Jim Harrison in his poem, “Bridge.” In it he imagines a bridge to nowhere that extends unfinished over the “continent” we call the sea.

Imagine that vantage point on life! It’s what poet’s do, and it creates what John Gardner, in his book, The Art of Fiction, dubbed “the dream”:

“In any piece of fiction, the writer’s first job is to convince the reader that the events he recounts really happened, or to persuade the reader that they might have happened (given small changes in the laws of the universe), or to engage the reader’s interest in the patent absurdity of the lie.”

It’s the same effect you get at the movies or watching TV. The viewer willingly offers himself up as hostage, saying, “Take me, please, into this fictional dream so that I can forget the here and the now presently sitting on either side of me.”

This technique belongs as much to poets as to prose writers. As proof, let’s walk out onto Jim Harrison’s bridge:

 

Bridge
by Jim Harrison

Most of my life was spent
building a bridge out over the sea
though the sea was too wide.
I’m proud of the bridge
hanging in the pure sea air. Machado
came for a visit and we sat on the
end of the bridge, which was his idea.

Now that I’m old the work goes slowly.
Ever nearer death, I like it out here
high above the sea bundled
up for the arctic storms of late fall,
the resounding crash and moan of the sea,
the hundred-foot depth of the green troughs.
Sometimes the sea roars and howls like
the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.
What beauty in this the darkest music
over which you can hear the lightest music of human
behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.

So I sit on the edge, wagging my feet above
the abyss. Tonight the moon will be in my lap.
This is my job, to study the universe
from my bridge. I have the sky, the sea, the faint
green streak of Canadian forest on the far shore.

 

I love job descriptions like “to study the universe from my bridge.” It brightens an otherwise boring résumé like nothing else.

And the allusion to Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, I think, is a nod to the foamy waters between Realism and Romanticism. A gray area. Or green-trough area, maybe, where one can enjoy the endless feast of sky, sea, and “faint green streak of Canadian forest on the far shore.”

And, neatly enough, the “other shore” can be more than just Canadian forest. It could be “the other side” as in crossing the bar from life to death. The bridge, in that case, is our life’s work. Isn’t there time for rest, then? Relaxation? Pride in accomplishment? A few words with people we care about, just before the bridge finds its final footing on a distant shore?

 

The Ordinary–It Should Scare You to Death

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cellar-stairs

Fringe. Niche. Eccentric.

These are words you might hear when people describe poets or poetry in general, at least in the States. Thing is, the joke’s on them (or at least in their mirrors). Why? Because everyone’s a poet, or at least was at one time.

As proof, my favorite 2 minute and 37 second video to share with students is Naomi Shihab Nye’s “One Boy Told Me.” Before reading a found poem wholly consisting of things her son said when he was 2- and 3-years-old, she shares what William Stafford once said when someone asked, “When did you become a poet?” He responded: “That’s not really the right question. The question is, when did you STOP being a poet? We’re all poets when we’re little. Some of us just try to keep up the habit.”

A little logic tells us, then, that the kid in all of us is the poet in all of us. It’s kind of like Halloween. You never quite get it out of your system. Now #2 behind Christmas in retail sales, October 31st has practically been taken over by adults who want to play dress up and “trick or treat” (without the door-to-door nonsense), too.

Whether you’re a student, a writer, or a party animal, then, you should take note: It’s the ordinary that should scare you to death.

What if I asked you to write something scary, for instance? Too often, when writers set out to scare readers, they fall victim to stock props of the genre as found on TV, in the movies, and yes, in literature. But there’s more to scaring people than vampires by night, zombies by day, and Fox News talking heads by any measure of time.

If you really want to write about fear, get in touch with your inner child (whether you’re age 50 or 12). As adults drugged on maturity, we often forget the powerful knack little kids have for seeing malevolence in the ordinary, and there’s no better Museum of the Extraordinarily Ordinary than a house’s basement.

Don’t believe me? Close your eyes a moment and conjure the basement of the house you grew up in. In my case, there was a rec room of no account on one side and then the unfinished side: concrete floor, washer/dryer, sump pump, oil tank, furnace, and that all important basement prop, “thing that goes bump in the night.” I can recall many a nightmare where various horrors came through the door separating these two sections.

But let’s move on to a good example of how basements tap can into our inner child mentality (and therefore our poetic imagination). It appears in the late poet Thomas Lux’s poem,  “Cellar Stairs,” a piece in which ice skates, ice picks, roofing nails, a fuse-box switch, and yes, even a freezer, do yeoman duty as witches, monsters, and boogeymen. As it’s only three 9-line stanzas, let’s take a look:

 

      Cellar Stairs
by Thomas Lux

      It’s rickety down to the dark.
Old skates, long-bladed, hang by leather laces
on your left and want to slash your throat,
but they can’t, they can’t, being only skates.
On a shelf above, tools: shears,
three-pronged weed hacker, ice pick,
poison-rats and bugs-and on the landing,
halfway down, a keg of roofing nails
you don’t want to fall face first into,

no, you don’t. To your right,
a fuse box with its side-switch-a slot machine,
on a good day, or the one the warden pulls,
on a bad. Against the wall,
on nearly every stair, one boot, no two
together, no pair, as if the dead
went off, short-legged or long, to where they go,
which is down these steps,
at the bottom of which is a swollen,

      humming, huge white freezer
big enough for many bodies—
of children, at least. And this
is where you’re sent each night
for the frozen bag of beans
or peas or broccoli
that lies beside the slab
of meat you’ll eat for dinner,
each countless childhood meal your last.

      “Cellar Stairs,” from New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin).

 

The minute you go for laughs or frights in the usual, well-trod places is the minute you should stop and reconsider the tack you’re on. Heck with masked, chainsaw-wielding psychopaths, people are killed every day by ladders, bathtubs, and stairs.

My advice, if it’s scares you’re after? Put down your remote and channel your childhood home and how much it resembles your present-day home. There are places in the former that scared you and places in the latter that should, and even though those places are populated with objects both hum and drum, your job — as a writer, as a poet, and as an aficionado of Halloween — is to make them thrum. Basements, attics, crawlspaces, closets, the one room people tend to avoid. After that, scare yourself even more. Try reading some poetry.

See you later. I’m going to the cellar for a ball-peen hammer and some ideas I’ve been toying with.

A George Bilgere Trifecta

Ken Craft poetry updates on a free-verse life

bilgere

George Bilgere is the Ernest Hemingway of contemporary of poets. By that I don’t mean he shoots innocent lions in his free time or drinks like a marlin. I mean he makes writing look effortless. The complex simplicity of his work inspires in poets a most valuable sentiment: the good old “I can do that, too!” sentiment.

It’s great inspiration, this sentiment. And at least it gets you started. But then you realize it is not as simple as it seems. You start writing a poem, all psyched and sure you’re musing with the best of them, and then things go haywire. By line four. Before you even turn the bend of stanza one. How does he do it, you wonder?

Let’s sample some of his work and see for ourselves. The first, “Haywire,” gives us a distant, pre-industrial past through the eyes of a very old relative who happens to live in some back room of a childhood friend’s house. The distant past is served up as an agrarian utopia of sorts. Something that looks awfully good, especially if you lean sentimental.

 

“Haywire” by George Bilgere

When I was a kid,
there was always someone old
living with my friends,
a small, gray person
from another century
who stayed in a back room
with a Bible and a bed with silver rails.

They were from a time before the time
the world just plain went haywire,

and even though nothing
made sense to them anymore,
they’d gotten used to it,
and walked around smiling vaguely
at the aliens ruining the galaxy
on the color console television,

or the British invasion
growing from the sides of our heads
in little transistorized boxes.

In the front room, by the light of tv,
we were just starting to get stoned,
and the girls were helping us
help them out of their jeans,

while in the back room
someone very tired
closed her eyes and watched
a wheat field where a boy
whose name she can’t remember
is walking down a dusty road.

No sound
but the sound of crickets.
No satellites,
Or even headlights in the distance yet.

The next poem out-Billies Billy Collins. We see the poet in some European setting–some Masterpiece Theatre set from the BBC–doing what he shouldn’t be doing: a whole lot of nothing. Can anything win our hearts faster? We are all complicit. Hark:

“Once Again I Fail to Read an Important Novel” by George Bilgere

Instead, we sit together beside the fountain,
the important novel and I.

We are having coffee together
in that quiet first hour of the morning,
respecting each other’s silences
in the shadow of an important old building
in this small but significant European city.

All the characters can relax.
I’m giving them the day off.
For once they can forget about their problems—
desire, betrayal, the fatal denouement—
and just sit peacefully beside me.

In the afternoon,
at lunch near the cathedral,
and in the evening, after my lonely,
historical walk along the promenade,

the men and women, the children
and even the dogs
in the important, complicated novel
have nothing to fear from me.

We will sit quietly at the table
with a glass of cool red wine
and listen to the pigeons
questioning each other in the ancient corridors.

 

Our final sample shows that Bilgere, a playful and casual poet, can also play the poignant card when he needs to. I like that in a poet. It’s fine to be good at something, but it’s finer to prove that your portfolio is diversified. I can think of no better example than the following poem:

 

“The White Museum” by George Bilgere

My aunt was an organ donor
and so, the day she died,
her organs were harvested
for medical science.
I suppose there must be people
who list, under “Occupation,”
“Organ Harvester,” people for whom
it is always harvest season,
each death bringing its bounty.
They spend their days
loading wagonloads of kidneys,
whole cornucopias of corneas,
burlap sacks groaning with hearts and lungs
and the pale green sprouts of gall bladders,
and even, from time to time,
the weighty cauliflower of a brain.

And perhaps today,
as I sit in this café, watching the snow
and thinking about my aunt,
a young medical student somewhere
is moving through the white museum
of her brain, making his way slowly
from one great room to the next.
Here is the gallery of her girlhood,
with that great canvas depicting her father
holding her on his lap in the backyard
of their bungalow in St. Louis.
And here is a sketch of her
the summer after her mother died,
walking down a street in Berlin
when the broken city was itself
a museum. And here
is a small, vivid oil of the two of us
sitting in a café in London
arguing over the work of Constable
or Turner, or Francis Bacon
after a visit to the Tate.

I want you to know, as you sit there
with your microscope and your slides,
there’s no need to be reverent before these images.
That’s the last thing she would have wanted.
But do be respectful. Speak quietly.
No flash photography. Tell your friends
you saw something beautiful.

If you haven’t sampled this Ohio poet’s work, give him a go. Not only will it be an enjoyable read, it will inspire you to write. Because, after all, writing is easy. You can do it, too*!

(*Results may vary.)