Some days we can’t find
the poem, at least not
the one we want to write,
the one about purple wisteria,
for instance, or the one
in which the raven appears
a sign that magic is present. Instead
the poem waits to be found
on the back of a paint sample card
or it’s cracked inside a blue glass ball.
You can glimpse it, there!
and it’s beautiful, dewy, but when
you find the pen, the poem
is as missing as the tin man’s heart.
Each time you get close,
it dives into the swimming pool,
though there is no diving allowed.
It tells you there is no happy hour
on Saturdays. It invites you to a dance party,
only you don’t have a car and it is much
too far away to walk.
For a moment, the poem was
a red tailed hawk, but the circles
it made were too high to read.
For a moment, the poem
pulled like turquoise wool
through your fingers, but then
every turquoise stitch you knit
uncounted itself and unraveled.
It is hard not to think it’s something
you’ve done. It is hard not to think
you’ve let yourself down, or even worse,
that you’ve let down the poem.
I’m here, you say, to the air, to the hawk,
to the purple wisteria blooms.
I’m here, you say to the raven, the road runner,
the blue, blue glass of the blue glass ball.
But you’re too in the way, and the more you try
the more it’s like trying to catch a cat that knows
you want to clip its claws.
And the poem slips out of the dragonfly wings
you found on the path this morning,
and it steals the silver from the nightshade leaves
beside the Rio Grande, and it walks out of the room without you.
Even it doesn’t know where it is going.
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