Poem for Wendy Bishop
When I Am Struggling
standing far from the tower
I fling gifts upward—
my skin packaged tightly around
tenure and the ache of composition
slowly, she begins, becomes, unfolds me
eating away the blue-black cancers of rhetoric and theory
lapping the marrow of doubt and
slurping the last flow of a bleeding heart
she grins wicked with the sharp tongue
and the even teeth of a critic, a stoic,
an ancient citizenry
waiting to stone me,
unpaged, unlined
shoved to the margins
of life
and writing
alone in a classroom of ivy
and gaping mouths,
orbs
left gurgling and choking on
words they cannot write |