So Late to the Party

Wild Rabbits Have Sharp Eyes

Which is another way of saying, everything you want to hide blares like a motel’s Vacant sign. How long it took

for you to tumble into sleeping on the couch, the bed stripped except for piles of laundry you could not bring yourself

to put away. Do you remember when you didn’t live inside this city’s constant siren, when you were

the teenager in the woods, wearing dark like a blanket, the night studded with stars as many as your friends. It’s just the past now:

the teenagers you later taught are all adults. They have children, lovers. You have a certain archive of a mind

that files away the beautiful impractical. For example: The Amish cultivate saffron. For example, Octopi have three hearts and die

of starvation--the mothers stop eating to guard their unhatched eggs. So you know things.

Knowledge doesn’t fix the faucet whose drip stains the white sink chlorine blue. Information is only your own hands

stroking your hips as you turn each night. What you would give to be a wheat field during a storm. Stalks bending, seeded

by violent rain, and the sky a clotted purple arch above you, lightening strikes that jolt you so you remember

no matter how dead you feel you are not dead.

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This poem appears in the collection So Late to the Party.
Reprinted by permission of Negative Capability Press.

To learn more about Kate and her book, go here.