March 10, 2025Dear First Draft of This Poem
I wrote you by hand but can barely read you now.
What beautiful cross-outs you offer
the world! Is that a comma or a smeared gnat?
I wanted to stay in you forever.
Six months later, in the teeth of winter,
you seem freshly naive. Elegy and carpe diem
competing in a lovely word salad, no need
to explain what Wile E. Coyote in stanza 1
has to do with Grandpa Mac wearing nothing
but scraps of steam and floating like balsa
in stanza 3. Mark this: I felt young in you.
And deliciously irresponsible. In your margin,
a list: bread, peaches, tofu, kalamata olives,
chips, cat food, donut holes, lemon curd …
Was I going shopping later or imagining
Emily Dickinson hanging a left at Mount
Holyoke for a stop at Market Basket?
I have no idea. Here I go again, talking to paper.
You were greedy to include everything:
Ariadne’s red thread, Sartre hiding
in his sister’s closet after he won the Nobel,
a scared hamster. Let some later me
decide what stays. Until then, help me
translate a few phrases. Kaleidoscopic arcs
of water, were they meant to be sprinklers?
Telestial gods: sparrow hawks slicing the sky
into a playground of above and below? As for
the hamster: not mine but Randy Thomas’s.
We found her after school fat with the babies
she had devoured, except for a tidy pile
of tails and feet. Is that your key trauma,
First Draft? Or me seeing my mom naked
a few lines later? I wish you’d help me
make up my mind. In you, First Draft,
I have just been born and I’ll never die.
In you, everything was still possible.
In you, I tried not to care about symbols.
The sun was literally going down. Wisps
of mist, aspen leaves quavering. Magpie
doing clever magpie things on a fence.
I was almost happy. When I closed my eyes,
flecks of blue coalesced then began to rise.
from #86 – Poetry Prize