It’s so self indulgent poetry isn’t it, more so than any other art form?
How unimportant, me a woman in her fifties, sitting here on a rainy November afternoon
my little dog asleep on a pillow beside me while I try perfecting an image that
you could never ever possibly compare to a measure of Chopin or a stroke of Monet’s
thick yellow oils I mean isn’t poetry the lowest on the arts totem pole if
we were being totally honest? Or is it just me not wanting to talk about my other
dog—the one who died in my arms last summer from a massive seizure, seriously
I’d have to sit here and weep to turn that hell into gorgeous language that
you’d wish you’d written. Well I can’t do it even if I used that
other night when my only daughter was taken away in an ambulance oh yes that would
make a great poem but first I’d have to gut punch you super hard then buoy
you up with hope in a way that was neither maudlin nor obtuse, OK I know it’s
not a poem yet but still doesn’t it mean something, the way the sun just killed
me right now slicing through that drenched fern on the grass then pulled back behind
clouds? There’s Bach on Pandora, my water glass reflected on polished walnut
and the dog left behind looking up at me with two steady eyes and then at the end
of all this, that feeling you get when the sun comes all the way out after a big
rain, how suddenly the weather can no longer be the metaphor for your loss.
poems have appeared in Autism Digest, Stand Up Poetry, The Unmade Bed, In the
Palm of Your Hand, The Antioch Review, The New York Quarterly, and many other
journals and anthologies. She works as a speech pathologist for the Poway Unified
School District.