Ten years ago
I was writing poems
brief as bird tracks.
A wing encapsuled
an entire spring.
Three morning grace notes
scored all summer.
A single beak
bit off autumn like a worm.
A few hieroglyphs
on the snow
said everything there was
to know of winter.
I was younger then.
I was more certain.
All my short spare poems
knotted themselves into a final word
like a crow shot from a tree.
But I’ve lost that brevity,
that arrogance
of what is what,
and my poems
flock like blackbirds
gleaning word after word,
line after line
from the waving field.
They are still famished,
cawing terribly in my mind.
I don’t know what to give them.
I keep on writing,
and writing.
~ from What have you lost? (HarperCollins, Greenwillow Books, 1999)
