from Vault

Love, be my guide. 
Summer rain in the afternoon. The librarian’s dress sticks 
like a wet cocktail napkin to her white skin as she leaps
up the steps, two at a time, an elegant and terrified doe,  
and we think this is funny and kind of erotic
and we laugh as we follow her inside
because we have caught her 
in a vulnerable and pretty moment.
Here is what we find:

With the exception of the Earth, the moon is the most 
carefully studied astronomical body in the universe. 
Before modern astronomy, the moon, in spite of great 
familiarity, retained exalted mystery and power. Now, 
of course, there are tens of thousands of photographs, 
and even celebrity footprints (also photographed).
How many footsteps to reach the moon? Untold. 
What a foolish question.
And now we know, unequivocally, that the lunar 
surface is really a sphere, not a woman’s face 
or a Chinese rabbit or a wheel of cheese, but 
plain old rock and lots of it, 2,160 miles in diameter, 
238,856 miles either above or below the Earth 
(no one knows which it is), stable enough to support 
heavy space vehicles and several heavy space men, 
a surface as hard and cold and empty as a snowball. 

So that’s how it is! So the facts are dull.
But look! I brought you a chunk of coal.
We’ll take it down into the library’s basement to spite the heat,
imagining the cool, filthy darkness to be our little storm cloud
in this bony desert of facts. If we wanted a view,
we’d climb to the second floor (nonfiction)
to see the wide world in bright relief,
threshing itself to splinters down on the street.

Below the sidewalk we’ll hold the coal between us.
We’ll agree that we mustn’t use our hands
and it can’t touch the floor. I’ll dig my cheek
into the knuckle of the black rock
and roll it down your chest.
Under this world, there is another one.

As Richard Hugo said about what poems do best, “If you want to communicate, use the telephone.”

For me, writing a poem is best described not in terms of any particular kind of theme, moral, message, form, or style, but rather as part of an emotional path I have begun to travel. When I begin, I sometimes have only the shape or trajectory of the poem in mind: something akin to a plunge off a cliff or the sweep of a pole vaulter rising through the air. I don’t know exactly what I want to say; I have more of an idea of what I want to feel with language. The form a poem takes evolves as I try and create a place with language for this feeling to inhabit.

A poem is made with all the tricks of language, but it isn’t about the language any more than a house is about the stone and wood that it is built with. It’s all about what happens when the reader steps into the experience the poem offers. I hope that my poems allow ? require - both the writer and the reader to take risks in order to gain the gifts of insight. I believe it is this process of discovery in writing a poem that gives it dimension, depth, and courage for me and, if it is a successful poem, for the reader.