The Mailman, 2004

“Maybe it’s the gap, the feeling that someone isn’t listening, doesn’t get it, has half heard us, that compels us to write and explain.”  —Natalie Goldberg

I was the mailman and

I thought I was carrying letters:

A, B, the whole symbolic mess

of alphabet turned to words, one

son or daughter writing from the third

world or some other pretechnological

handwritten place, but instead

I found myself

going insubstantial, literally,

believe me—it happened—

blinking out, like migraine

flashes of light that float

and disappear. Each text

I carried was blank with unmeaning.

In this century and at the end

of the last, I was noself and the words

depended only on words. I delivered

letters to boxes. Mother,

receiver of delivery,

maker of the daughter—or son—

made meaning of the blankness

of the letter, of the word: You

know how you are, she said,

You know what you’re like.

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Poetry: A Resurgence

for the poets among us
—“The British critic F.R. Leavis used to observe
that a poem is not a frog.”  —from The Creative Writing

At the end of the twentieth century, we were warned.

No one could find frogs in the volume to which

we’d grown accustomed. Upon inspection,

the frogs we found were missing legs or had extras.

Small hind quarters jutted obscene

from their thick and proper limbs, their sight

was bifurcated and tenuous, their faces

misshapen. The polar icecaps

and the frogs were virtual canaries

in the coal mine. Take heed, the great seers said.

We have seen and not seen said the see-ers.

Poems, however, were ubiquitous. Their growth rate

was alarmingly high. You could find the Laureate

at the end of the newscast reciting unrhymed lines

or singing on radio shows. Trudging to your car

after a long shift, you’d find stanzas pressed under the wipers.

Even our young drank beer and heard the rhythm

of the night’s hundred poems chanted from their stages.

The poems were a chytrid fungus, rapid and mortal.

We were breathing through our skins and we didn’t know it.

The Good Reader lived here and there, lifted the wipers, pressed

her bifocals to the soft cotton covering her belly,

and commenced, tuning her voice to the

violin’s virtuosity. The world was getting warmer

by the instant. The real gardens bloomed into the winter.

All the imaginary toads might have died. Yes,

they said, but at least we all died in the truth.
  
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