I hate it when poets pretend they don’t know anything about their own writing processes and get arty and mysterious when asked about it, claiming in a zillion different ways that they ‘receive’ their poems from the Beyond, or that the poems already exist in the abstract and that they, the poet, just ‘discover them,’ etc. I’ve been hearing a lot of this kind of thing lately. I think it comes in waves.
At the end of the work day
you could tell exactly how far you had gotten
and how much farther you had to go.
Some nights when the fishing slows,
when the stripers
and hybrids drift through the cove like elusive thoughts,
you crank in the jig, prop the rod in the boat.
Men on parade. Men
migrant Hispanic and red
necks in long hair clean
shaven the kind my
daddy bought parts from never
touching some of them
could rewire your grand
ma’s house sharing their wife’s tort
illas.
I do not always have the right thing to say
The Paint nickered, trotted toward us, lowered its broad soft nose to our dog, and I wondered why dogs and