The Poet

The poet lived in a tree house in the woods,

with an ocean view.

She subsisted on a literary grant and nuts.

I was teaching school and writing about rain.

She framed her poems with steel girders,

breathing life into them

with language of cirrus clouds.

She was seeking to fathom with her poetry,

but they were unfathomable to me

at a noisy open mic

where we met on a blind date.

She didn’t seize the room.

She didn’t care.

This was walking the plank into survival.

Her son had died of SIDS several years ago.

No one else was around.

She buried his memory in a storage unit:

ashes, bassinet, mobiles.

She had stopped paying the bill.

Notices arrived. She didn’t respond.

When she read her poems to me,

I barely followed.

They were more obscure on paper.

They costumed her life.

Why do poets try to dazzle

with their slanting?

Why sly around the moment

you discovered your dead baby in a crib,

rattler still in hand,

and camouflage the moment in a labyrinth of fog?

She evinced no curiosity about my writing,

never read a word.

She asked without asking.

I paid $600 to cover arrears on the storage unit.

I paid another $600 for six more months.

She never defined this as a loan.

One night,

she cried in bed,

bleeding from our abortion.

She told me should could not get pregnant.

I believed her.

I slept on the floor holding my dying dog.

A euthanizing in the morning.

The grant was running out.

She wanted to move in,

birth a child; I’d support her.

Years later,

she sent me a poem.

I understood this one.

I apologized and sent her

a $7500 lithograph

of black rain,

like the rain that strafed her tree house.

Call her poem a castigation

of my character,

relayed in right angles,

built like a jungle gym.

If still in my possession,

I would have let it conclude this poem.