Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.
At the Book Shrink
one learns to say “my body uses me
as a grape uses wine–”
to talk about inevitability,
the essence of plot.
But what happens when a person
understands she is being sent
back, glass by glass,
to the invisible pouring stations
of the larger narrative?
That she is merely like or likely
a person in a book?
Like a salt water balloon
sinking in the ocean.
Like a person in a book, like
I said already. Someone’s
not listening. Someone’s
eating breakfast or falling
asleep or texting a married lover
as shrinks are wont to do.
If I am boring then at least
I am getting somewhere:
through the wood I knock on.
My story is telling.
But it’s not telling me.
I need help getting to the next part.
When I open my mouth,
liquid rushes in, endrunkening.
When I close it,
dark, secret-looking drops spill
crimson on the page.
One response
I love that line break from the next-to-the-last to the last line: spill / crimson. There is a visceral response to that liquid’s falling. In the time it takes eyes to go from “spill” to “crimson,” your hand – the dominant one – imagines it’s been called upon to reach out, palm up, and catch the dripping dark.
That sensation lingers long after the last word of the poem. Gravity-filled fluid slipping. Like silky runaway streams of unspooled holiday ribbon, over the sides & through the spaces of your fingers-&-thumb cup.
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