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POEM
by Penelope Shuttle
A poem stays awake long after midnight
talking you from room to room,
does not care that walls have ears,
las paredes oyen
A poem prefers tin to silver,
silver to gold,
gold to platinum
Every year
a poem tosses a young woman from the cliffs
to the rocky sea below
A poem accidentally sends the entire letter f
off to Florence
but keeps the letter t
in a matchbox, like a tiny contraband tortoise
Sometimes
a poem is your only daughter
busy and happy in the world,
China or Spain,
abundancia de riqueza
Like the partial Angel Gabriel
in Santa Sophia
a poem is half-gold, half-invisible
A poem will do things in England
she'll never do in France
It will take more than the ten thousand lakes
for which Minnesota is famous
to drown a poem
The poem pauses now and then
to look at nothing-much-in-particular
A poem likes scraping and burnishing
the prepared surface of the etching copper,
is frequently found note-taking copiously
from The Fantastic Historia Animalium of the Rain
A poem makes herself tiny as a waterbear
or a tardygrade,
a mite able to survivie freezing, boiling,
able to go into suspended animation
for one hundred years, if need be
From Redgrove's Wife, published by Bloodaxe Books, 2006.
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