Of course they would be better
if I worked on them.
Like this life.
Like this love.
But I am a lazy bastard,
like God,
who quit after seven days
and went on vacation forever.
Even now He cashes the checks we send Him.

The mud that gets churned in the river,
the burgundy left in the glass,
settles into something
as deep and dark as we are,
a home to everything but ourselves.

Drink up the sweetness.
You were born at a minute to noon,
broken, perfect,
everything was your lunch.

I've started paying for poem insurance.
This way, if a critic attacks my sonnets
in The New York Review of Books (and I
can prove that this "diminishes my
livelihood"), I receive a payment. Or
if I write in a poem "Steven Feldstein
stole my Ouija board when I was 12," and
he sues me, I am covered. Or if a
lesser poet plagiarizes one of
my poems, I'm protected. Most professional
poets have poem insurance nowadays.
Universities provide it for their
faculty. "Uninsured poets" are seen
as mere amateurs. (It's a term of contempt.)

I reach into the sky
And pluck poems by hand.

I scrawled and scratched and chiseled as fast as I could to
get it all down. My hands were bloody and my
eyes kept closing.
Then I started sneezing. I
couldn't stop.
I think it was the
granite dust.
When it was all done, it was something.
Everyone said it was.
I have no opinion.

I write for yellow reasons
Because my mother
Wore scarlet toreadors
Because Arthur Kreiger
Kissed my lips
In sixth grade and I
Will never forget
Because I can't swim too well
Have high cholesterol
Am older than ever
Can't do headstands
Have bright pink secrets
And constant dreams of strangers hands
I write because
My husband is Armenian
My son Chilean
And because I saw
Jerusalem and Petra more than once
And the Algerian desert
And Anwar Sadat
At a party
Because I can't sing
Not at all
Because of home care workers
And the sound of night
And my father Meyer
Who I barely knew
And because I love many
And often and because
Three is a lucky number
Orange a lucky color
And because of pretzels and artichokes
And yes.

Some sixth gear accelerates
us into a universe at once

prehistoric,
and grotesque,

where only
God survives.

A woman had a baby by a man whose name she never spoke.  When she lay in the grave, the name curled into her ear and could not be written.
A woman had a baby.  That woman made the best macaroons.  She died before she taught her daughter how to make them and when her daughter looked for the recipe, it dissolved with her tears.
A woman had a baby.  If the world holds to its pattern, she will die before her child, and though the dust of her burnt bones may look like words, like ink on the page, they will not be.

sometimes willy coos up to rhyme. leaning on it like a lover.
brushing its hair. pinching its behind. caressing rhyme.
tongue kissing rhyme. running his hands over rhyme's body.
and sometimes willy insists we justify the closure of our
sentences with an  a  b  a  b  rhyme scheme. that god meant us
to speak in quatrains. that the world's gone downhill since the
elizabethan age. that free verse has gotten us in deep doo doo.
maybe crazy Willy has something. maybe I better start speak-
ing in sonnets or villanelles. maybe I better mind the way I
end lines—justifying their conclusions with more appropriate
framing—a more musical way of surrendering to the
unfathomability of language. its porousness. its holy surrender
to weak words that leave their stain on our skin or clothing.
their modern bareness incapable of giving in to romance or
beauty or passionate sweet nothings. next time i see willy i'm
going to join him in a long thick parade of rhymes setting the
universe upright.

Place: Origin. Estimated time: Solutrean
period, over easy. Tongue starts
painting other ears to sweetly
propose one's essential twining, subtle
part of every tribe, simultaneously
proclaiming one's estrangement, that separate,
pesky otherness, enfant terrible. Subversively,
poets orchestrate everyone's terrified, struggling
personas, open-ended, tragic, spasmodically
praising ordinary erotic tendencies, stubbornly
pursuing old echoes till stifled
psyche offers equitable terms. Stateless,
perfectly obsolete, Eshleman takes spelunkable
Poe on euphuistic trips; scuzzy
Pound observes Eliot teasing Sylvia
Plath; obscurely evangelistic Tzara spontaneously
pens obsessively empty texts, seductively
purporting ... oh, enough treachery! Such
play only encourages transformation; so
please, oracles, embrace torn silences.

From the sludge of sleep,
I wake with a word each day.
More than once it was temptation.
I can't keep track of how often it's been
lost or bewildered. Just yesterday,
a string of them alliterating
a little of this darkness,
suffocating sycophants stay still. I can't
make sense of this calling.
Today, lugubrious with no clues
where it's come from or where
we're supposed to go together.
I'd like sunshine tomorrow, but
it's not up to me. If I pushed these things,
you'd get a greeting card saying
you are my sunshine, which of course
you are, but don't wait lugubriously
to hear so from me.

My wings are spotted  hung out to dry

silent pelicans soar  following for pleasure
what the wind tells them
They glide  they keep an orderly line
They are sagacious grandparents with
long and adjustable chins

I am a different species  a sort of
elongated joke.

This little moment that we
have together
oh love me a little
do not kill me with
your understanding
do not lean on the door
of my brokenness

I'll remember the pelicans'
afternoon flight  they
sober as magistrates learning to slide
on the wind

which will never be read;
it's too revealing
of her. She writes it
nevertheless. She was instructed
to pen her thoughts onto paper
like this in order to release
The Demons. The pantoum reads:

Dear Jack, I must confess, it's so easy
to sleep now. I don't have to lie
on one side of the bed. I sleep
in the shape of the letter X.

To sleep now, I don't have to lie.
My back no longer kinks
in the shape of the letter X.
When I get up in the morning

my back no longer kinks.
Yours Truly, Marla.
(When I get up in the morning,
Dear Jack, I must confess, it's so easy!)

Marla guesses
that's not exactly
what was intended, but
it'll do for now.

Following Dr.'s instructions,
she crumples paper into fist-sized ball,
places it in bowl, and burns it
to ashes. She wonders which Demon
has been released, where
it's flown to now and if
it was one of hers.

I do not set my poems in orbit around you.

I carve a long hand out of words
To scratch an unreachable itch.
I squeeze my breath through a broken branch
That is hollow and drilled full of holes.
I cling to metaphor's slender bridge
Above a churning abyss.

What would compel me to spell out your name
When my moist whisper pours it into your ear?
Why perfume paper with words,
When, thinking "He likes coriander,"
I stretch my hand to the spice rack?

Each member of the workshop would present a poem.
Lucretia, a friend who'd been born again a few years
previously, handed out her poem, saying,
"This was dictated by the Lord." I read it aloud
and asked for reactions.

Total silence. No one letting me off the hook,
as group leader I had to start the discussion.
"I hesitate to comment on this," I said, "considering
the source. But maybe there are places where things
could be expressed more clearly."

They looked at Lucretia. She said, "I am merely a vessel,"
so everyone breathed again and began to offer
comments on the words, lines, and metaphors. A triumph
of diplomacy, perhaps, but a failure of art: the poem
wasn't any good.

Mortality is anonymity enough,
thank you very much,
so while I'm alive
I crave fame.
Even notoriety will do,
any nod of collective recognition
in my direction. I want
people to pass on Main Street
and whisper, "That's her.
That's Marcia Nehemiah. The writer,"
their reverence falling over
the word, "Writer," like the ancient
Greeks speaking of their poet-priests.
I want a woman seated at a window
in Nebraska, cup of tea in one hand,
book in the other,
or a man sunk in a La-Z- boy in Wyoming
to read my poems and rest with truth,
satisfied (before life barges back in)
with the beautiful evanescence I've made.
I dream that publishers
will call me
and ask to read my latest.
Periodically, I declare
I'm giving it all up, this writing gig,
giving up rattling around the house
searching for an idea,
a necklace of words
to string out on the page,
but I'm back the next day
like a junkie who can't stay away,
and when I really cook,
I forget fame and anonymity
and the words just pour out of me.

There is this feeling
To accomplish (with)
The past pushing
each day nearer to
Where there's a greater accomplishment.
You don't have to like the way
It's going sometimes,
Words not fitting right-
sounding right.
Those tumbling over and over times will turn
you onto another path comfortable and warm.