April is National Poetry Month

Part of Eve's Discussion  -- Marie Howe

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.




Notes for My Future Biographer -- Courtney Queeney


The dark things I did started young, stayed.

Then I heard a cello and thought,
Oh. That's how you say it.

I could spell and count to a hundred
in several languages, but never learned the words
to help anyone to a church.

There were X number of men;
I couldn't solve for X.

With the chameleon as my model
I greened and glowed outside,
or rippled underwater.
Alone, I was translucent, I was

. . .

barely, but survived myself
those early years,

which prepared me
for the later ones,
when I felt like furniture

and never told the truth.