after Gayle Brandeis
The poem you’re going to write tomorrow
is somewhere in your cells, is made
from language you’ve been learning
and forgetting since your birth.
The poem you’re going to write tomorrow
will ask you to go beyond who you are today,
will invite you leap over the edge of the known
and may or may not offer wings or a parachute,
may in fact stuff stones in your pockets.
It promises no net.
The poem you are going to write tomorrow
will certainly be more wise than you are,
drawing as it does on infinite potential,
something you can only touch for a moment
before the words on the page become solid
and stuck in their serifs, trapped in their
clever cages of metaphor. But the poem is there,
it’s always there, that poem you will write tomorrow,
with a promise that if you show up, it will come to wrestle,
will let you glimpse its latent thrill, that thrill
you’ve tasted before that keeps you coming
back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.