“For a good hour I have been singing lays in langue d’oc to a woman who knows only langue d’oil …
My sentiments are tangled like kites in the branches of her incomprehension.”
– Billy Collins
Inspiration greets me at dawn
when my mind is uncluttered,
merging with dreams.
My thoughts line up neatly,
shoulder to shoulder,
their shoes polished to a high gloss.
A new poem is born.
Unfortunately
by the time I get to the typewriter
my lively libretto has broken ranks.
Words march into the wrong stanzas.
Sentences fall out of formation
or go back to bed.
I had to teach myself
to contain this mischievous regiment,
to marshal the clarity of first light.
At first I looked for inspiration in obvious places.
I watched the dog curl up in a patch of contentment.
I heard moonlight tiptoe across the terrace.
Soon my perspective expanded.
I began to see beauty everywhere.
I learned to read nature’s songbook
and write in the language of flowers:
The noble roses of matrimony.
The haughty hubris of the narcissus.
The sudden crush of a wildflower
springing up amid life’s well-tended fields.
One windy night my muse sat right next to me in a tavern.
I saw distant horizons in her eyes.
I composed mythic melodies beneath her balcony.
My words formed a battalion and broke into song.
I woke up much later,
sensibility gone AWOL,
howling at the moon.
Now I plant my poems in a box by the window,
airy aspirations springing up in plain view.
My house of words is under construction,
roofless and open to the sky,
waiting for a gentle rain of insight from above.
You can find me beneath the palms,
untangling the breeze.
I’ll be the gardener whose verse needs pruning,
the dog that gnaws on the bone of contrition,
the earnest author of his own demise.