TALLGRASS

POEM ON ALICIA’S BIRTHDAY

                                   for Mountain

I’m home alone tonight, Lish, like

I often am—alone with Frank and

some eggplant resting in the colander

with salt, emptying itself. I’ve written

about that before—salting eggplant—

and today I read that Bishop found

a way to put all that down—that fear

of echoes, broken records, that need to make

each poem an isolated event. She wrote this

in a letter to her analyst, who seems

to have helped her better know herself

though in the end she kept on drinking.

Sometimes treatment is more tonic

than cure. I imagine you’ve had

that thought before, alone in a room

halfway up that Manhattan high-rise

where you sit with the folks you analyze.

I imagine you there, just before

an appointment. You have a notebook,

I think. One of your yellow legal pads,

and a pencil at the ready. You look

professional and friendly. Or maybe

you’re on your phone, double-tapping love

to a joke or a picture of a dog and when

the 6:30 knocks, you start, look up and say,

come in, come in, and push the machine

back into your pocket, a text to Nora

or Emma or Becca or me half composed,

unsent, but you’ll come back to it later because

you always come back to us later. That’s

what a poem is, right? The return

to something known, to someone, a long

friendship where you can say it and say it

all over again. Holding steady for that.

Bishop said that all her poems, they go on

into each other or overlap, etc, that they’re

all really one long poem anyway. I liked that.

I thought you’d like it too.

READING A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN IN THE COLUMBIA PUBLIC LIBRARY

This room belongs to all of us. High up

on the third floor, the last floor, the room

at the top of the tower, glass tower, some

panes transparent, others translucent, light

all through it, all through us, and that’s ours,

too. The quiet, the sense of mild topography,

like we’re really somewhere—ours. Or rather

our small share of everyone’s. The young

women typing alone at big tables, trading

off trips to the restroom, quick-crouch

of polite request to watch my stuff for a minute?

and our bright, mutual acquiescence. Older

men alone with their chairs pushed far back

from the table to permit their knees,

pitched high to provide a living rest

for the day’s news, all spread out, all

of us all spread out, a few snoring lightly

in the cushioned chairs facing the windows,

bathed in light, the good free light, snoring

and farting and dreaming in all this clear,

democratic light. …the beauty of the world,

which is so soon to perish…and it was women

who made this a free library, 1919, booze

banned but all these books to be taken out

and into oneself forever, ten years to go

before Virginia’s lecture on the other side

of the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Atlantic,

which Woolf never crossed and so she also

never knew either river, although

she imagined them—long liquid tongues,

she wrote, lending sensual body

to that lack. This essay was called

“America, which I Have Never Seen,”

and it’s standard fare for imagining America

from afar: lucky people who look good and

look forward, always, who drink everything

iced and crack open mountains saying,

take it, it’s free, but no mountain was harmed

in the making of this room in this place

where I get to know Virginia from afar, imagining

her imagining women imagining women,

all of us born away on it, born from it,

and the light that settles, now, among us—

it is brilliant, and it is common. Ours.