YOU SHOULD WRITE A POEM ABOUT THAT, SHE SAYS

as though writing a poem
is feeding chunks of meat through a grinder
and catching the links of sausage on the other side.
I’m grateful for her acknowledgement 
of what poets do, but it’s more like
following where the poem wants to go,
this craft with no recipe and no meat grinder,
this airy thing, not on command
but rather—don’t laugh—more like
a streetlight making the ordinary
show up; it was there all day but the poem
lights it, shows the tree flailing in a high wind,
a few leaves swirling down, the ordinary
flatness of the sidewalk where no one is
standing, but could, if the poem chose,
support someone in a gray parka shifting
from one foot to the other in the cold,
someone with the smell of hashbrowns
and bacon in clothing and hair,
someone you used to walk toward
and, with enough light, 
might still throw your arms around.

Marjorie Saiser’s The Track the Whales Make (Ted Kooser’s Contemporary Poets Series, University of Nebraska Press) won the High Plains Book Award in 2022. Saiser’s Losing the Ring in the River (University of New Mexico Press) won the Willa Award for Poetry in 2014. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Midwest Quarterly, and MockingHeart Review. More information at poetmarge.com.