Joan Fleming
YOUNG WOMAN TALKING TO A DIFFICULT POEM SHE HAS LOVED FOR MANY YEARS
Why do you keep hiding things from me? Always that inscrutable turn of the ankle as you leave the room of the page. I don’t know. Sometimes I can hold you in my mouth like a sip of seawater. Other times, I carry you around like a stone, a burnished stone from the pocket of the pea coat of some grand captain who knows a great deal more about the navigation of poetry than I do. I suppose songs don’t have to mean anything when they come out of birds’ mouths. Beaks, that is. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to admonish. I like that you keep changing. Today salty, tomorrow, tasting of grey. Who lives in the white space around your borders? The fingerprints of the poet are there, smudgy as ownership. And the breath of anyone else who’s ever read you. Even folded up, even shut in the dark of a closed book, you can never leave our ears.
