Reading the Mystery Novel
Forget the pool boy with the congressman's wife.
Forget the professor with the lead pipe, the maid
with the arsenic, the estranged son with a gun.
Ignore the drifter with the smile sharp as a white
picket fence, neighbours sweet as marzipan.
Stare at the body being dismantled by beetles,
exposing the skeleton untouched by guilt or greed.
Gather the clues. Figure out the motive. Assemble
the suspects in the front room. Point the finger
at yourself. Remember the skull, how it used
to be someone like yourself, lost in the endless
rooms of grief and love, playing the same game
over and over again.
[Previously published in The Battered Suitcase in 2009]
To the One Who Stole a Book at My Poetry Reading
Good writers borrow, great writers steal,
they say. I say it belonged to you already--
the sounds of the words, the spell of the words,
and the words themselves, they belong
to all of us. As do the silences. As does
the breath. Ours the air in the room, ours
the shared mouth where the words live,
ours the deepest listening. Listen, after
the reading, when they lined up to buy my book,
it felt a little like extortion: me taking their money
and giving them back what was already theirs.
Poetry belongs to everyone. And to no one.
Kudos to you for insisting on that. Thank you
for reminding me my poems aren't my poems.
