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I wrote a poem today.
Not this one of course.
It was one of those poems like
the one in Big Magic where it came
swooping across the meadow and
the lady had to run fast as she could
back to her house so she’d be ready with
pencil and paper, and she only just
made it in time, catching
it at the last minute
by the tail.
Yeah.
And it was perfect.
It was like the Percy one by Mary Oliver.
She said it came all in one piece,
without a single word
out of place.
I wrote this poem all morning
lying in bed, feeling into
how it feels when you really nail it.
Imagining I’d nailed it.
Seeing it in the New Yorker.
Lonely literary masturbation.
And then I remembered.
I have to get up and
sit at my breakfast table and
hold a pen in my arthritic hand and
put it to paper, and
write this rough approximation,
this sad, ordinary disappointment…
