by Denise Calvetti Michaels
1. How could I pour into four walls everything my pen wanted to say?
No house was ever big enough to write in.
I return home, cover tables with first drafts on unlined paper.
Wrens rise from birch, transformed to scrolls of chalk.
When I awake from this dream the leaves outside my studio window are falling.
2. Maybe it was near the water.
Did I say I was running away to write?
3. Some would say we failed—the walk to the clearing—pursuing the poet’s life.
That was yesterday.
When summer struck the steeple we didn’t know we were beautiful.
