Eternal Monday

Months pass and I don't feel

twinges of jealousy toward those

who got there first with the great

idea. This happens when I'm not

reading much. Other times, delight

and deflation. Wouldn't that be

a nice first line: "Delight and deflation

come at the same time." I wonder

if it has already been exploited. I could search

with quotation marks. Or I could tell myself,

Don't worry, go ahead and make it yours.

When we make something ours, the world

gets smaller. Pleasure, after all, buds

most abundantly in fenced gardens.

In youth I ran around lovers, lovers

who loved me, but never felt cemented

by love. It was a case of the eternal Monday:

time to kiss was time to go to work,

and the timing couldn't have been worse—

the beginning of the labor week. Still,

labor I did. War made me learn

a new language. Hooked, I learned another.

In my pocket passports proliferated.

You could say alliteration no longer

pleases the way it once did, and that the latinate

proliferated grates. I myself have made similar

arguments. Interestingly, the upshot of thinking

self-consciously in feeling like a machine.

It is hard not to return to looking up as a way

to settle wondering. Of course, metaphor aside,

we don't do much looking up. If we did,

we would know it's the clouds that are fickle,

not the sun. That seems like a good stopping point,

yet it gives off a whiff of—smugness?

I cannot help what I feel any more than the sun

can help being there. I cannot help

being in love with Ruefle's milkshake

and Koethe's swimmer. It is risky to name poems

in a poem, yet if I failed to name, I wouldn't be writing

in this moment, on this day, watching yellow

daffodils in the wind sway. And if I failed

to discover my clouds, the clouds

that don't let me see my life as it really is,

I also failed to imperil the machinery.

Hurrah for the rain.

Source: Twice There Was a Country (Cleveland State University Press, 2020)