scrapofpaper | those girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes, I have to look away until my darkness goes

"To _________, Who Keeps Revising"
I cannot bear it. Three years on the same poem and still
re-gluing its most intimate pieces. I want to take you
by the neck and shake you until all of them come shattering out
because a poem cannot exist that way.
It's not always your own.
You can't keep it, no matter how much you revise.
Once someone else has read the damn slippery thing
it has damn slipped right out of your headlock.

Let the baby go, let it stumble forward on fat short legs;
be poorly received by the critics, or received well;
be handed in photocopy to children who don't know
what to say, and offer foolish interpretations such as
"This poem is about death, all poems are about death."
or over-reach their bounds, exhaust their libraries of analysis,
"Assonance." "The line breaks." "Metaphor.";
be grimaced over; be bought cheaply, or by accident;
be something useless and something profound;
or just get stuck in between two other poems
and maybe removed, like the pink opaque slice
of deli tomato.

Or just forgotten.

Once the poem is written it's no longer yours to change.
I see what fear compels you, I know that fear, too.
Give that poem to me and to every other poet
because it's a gray terror we all share, and write poetry
to the altar of, getting down on our knees, genuflecting
with assonance, the line breaks, metaphor.

I cannot bear it because you think if you keep that poem
it will somehow continue immortally in immortal change.
I'm sorry. The only immortal process the poem possesses
is the ignition of its own volition. A poem is only the poet's once,
in the moments between the first line and the last.
The longer the moment the less vital the poet.
All the more frightened of what it means to finish the act.
I, too, am sad when it comes time to finish a sandwich.
That's one less sandwich in my life. It felt good to start it
with all that sensation left between me and the end.

But do me a favor, lady.
Honor the process.

Just eat the sandwich.
--Jaida Jones

"To Love Life"
The thing is
to love life
to love it even when you have no
stomach for it, when everything you've held
dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands
and your throat is filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you so heavily
it's like heat, tropical, moist
thickening the air so it's heavy like water
more fit for gills than lungs.
When grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief.
How long can a body withstand this? you think,
and yet you hold life like a face between your palms,
a plain face, with no charming smile
or twinkle in her eye,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you again.
--Ellen Bass